Saturday, May 31, 2008
Wednesday, May 28, 2008
Who Needs Polar Bears?
Alaska most defiantly does not need Polar Bears. They don’t tap dance on the ice like our penguin friends. Following the recent decision by the United States to list the polar bear as an endangered species, Alaska has decided to sue the decision. This lunacy was out of fear that the Department of Fish and Wildlife could possibly declare “critical habitat” on behalf of the polar bear, preventing all those Alaskan Republicans from raking in bags of cash from those big bad oil companies that want to drill into the Alaskan pot of gold. “I’m done sick of thems damned polared bears!” Alaska’s Governor Sarah Palin told me in an exclusive phone interview, followed by the sound of her cocking a rifle.
Florida sure as hell doesn’t need polar bears either, as writes John Herbert of Hernando Today, a publication of the Tampa Tribune:
“After roaming abandoned Arctic shacks and North Polar ice floes from the North Slope of Alaska to the Norwegian archipelago of Spitsbergen since the 1960s, and some close encounters with stray polar bears, I long ago concluded that we humans need continued protection from the aggressive, speedy and very carnivorous one-ton hairballs. Polar bears can take care of themselves just fine — and scare the wits out of us in the process. They don't need any federal intervention or protection; thank you very much.”
You’re very welcome.
So it appears that here we go, yet again. A divided country will now be forced to face global warming in the name of the polar bear. As endless lawsuits inevitably blame the federal government for protecting the polar bear against global warming while not directly addressing it, Congress will at some point be forced to fix this oxymoron. On one side will stand those who believe in the rational and right while on the other will stand those who fear it may cost them a buck or two. Sound familiar?
Einstein defined insanity as “doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.” A math equation is either correct or incorrect. Without shifting the numbers or calculations it would be impossible to find a solution. This suggests, if not proclaims, that a life without calculation is merely a life without truly rational humanity. To do the same thing twice may actually be a mathematical impossibility, let alone as many times as “over and over again” may suggest. Though it may be possible to miscalculate consistently, if not constantly, when seeking some sort of conclusion. In this sense, Einstein’s insanity is merely a state of mind.
I once had a teacher who informed me that when someone is learning new information “the brain pulses and throbs and ripples and lines begin to form! It’s incredible!” Yes that is, and the thought still horrifies me. My throbbing brain was growing weary of new information and at times I thought my skull might crack. “Feel that! You feel that? Feel that pulse! LET’S LEARN!” So one by one we’d all get our turn to walk up to the dry-erase board and present conclusions from our pre-algebra homework the night before. Numbers divided, added or subtracted. Most of us were wrong, our brains exhausted from their stimulated workouts, but she gladly corrected us and taught us how to do it all correctly. She called teaching “the passing of the throbbing pulse!”
One thing has become clear up to this point. We are a species that learns, uses that knowledge and focuses the latter two tasks toward the goal of accuracy. We’re not the only beings to remain helplessly driven by our associations. In fact we probably have it easier than most living things, a great majority of which end up dead at the hands of their own ignorance to the great lessons of life meant to ensure their survival. Birds don’t just step out of a nest and say “Dude, let’s just like fuckin fly and shit.” Actually, they usually fall on their asses and get up and try again. Or they make like the poor baby duckling my parents spotted off the Columbia River. A blue Herron snatched him from the river water, away from the pack and high into the air. Then, out of nowhere, a bald eagle intercepted and knocked the poor baby duck from the clutches of the Herron. As the duckling fell helplessly toward the water, a second eagle swooped from below and caught the squaking feather-ball in mid-descent. Surely, a meal for their own offspring.
What a fucked up circle of life! Even when we’ve been unfairly handed the wrong cards our ignorance still manages to fuck us over. “No Ashley! How many times do I have to show you?” Our math teacher was slightly impatient but to her credit Ashley never really got it. Every time she was told to add she would merely divide. Subtraction was indivisible. When told to multiply she’d stupefy. Mind you, Ashley didn’t give a shit. Ashley was a cool eighth grader, sporting bright red hair and an orange racecar jumpsuit. She had an iPod. Ashley wasn’t passing the throbbing pulse.
So why should she? “I get math, but what does it all mean?” I asked. Teacher merely smiled, “Neither you, nor I will ever know.” I still think that a stupid answer to a very obvious opportunity for that profound “teacher” moment that every educator looks forward to. We’ve all been fed that bullshit paragraph of overtly profound, sweeping sentences that avert the reality of uncertainty. Instead she stuck with the obvious, and probably true, sentiment that neither of us really knew quite what to do with this stimulating yet seemingly arbitrary tapestry of second-hand knowledge.
When a subduction earthquake struck off the coast of Indonesia in December 2004, an aftershock of tsunamis leveled coastlines throughout the region. Nearly a quarter of a million people were killed in what has been logged as the deadliest natural disaster in human history. Few saw it coming. Despite the magnitude 9.2 earthquake hours before, business continued. Despite nearly a mile of previously unexposed beach, many wandered toward the receding waves with ignorant curiosity. Even as the waves began crashing past their usual shorelines many still failed to heed the now obvious warning. In one video of the tragic event a camcorder captures the moment a dubious tourist pulls his digital camera out to take a close-up photo of the incoming wave. As he waits for the flash on his camera to charge a wave engulfs him and every other visible structure so close to the point of impact.
All the while the ancient tribes inhabiting the islands of the Indian Ocean near the epicenter of the massive quake saw things differently. Long before the waves crashed unto their beaches the tribes had fled to higher ground in fear of the massive destruction. The warnings found on these islands were reiterated in responses throughout Southeast Asia and as far away as East Africa. Few land roaming animals faced casualties or seemed caught off guard at the approach of the killer waves. There are many theories as to why this primal phenomenon occurs with animals, the most popular being their heightened sense of hearing and smell that may react to the vibrations and electromagnetic changes in the atmosphere. This hypothesis has never been successfully recreated while many scientists have brushed the theory away as purely a collection of “anecdotes.” In 2005, National Geograpahic reported a flood of eyewitness accounts regarding animals fleeing inland, refusing to leave their private zoo enclosures or heading toward higher ground. It was also hard to deny that the clean up efforts in much of the region faced very few if any animal carcasses.
Let’s not forget those damn pandas! Just weeks ago, British tourists exploring the Woo-Long National Reserve in China started noticing strange behavior amongst the pandas. The pandas “had been really lazy and just eaten a little bit of bamboo, and all of a sudden they were parading around their pen,” told a very jolly and animate Diane Etkins to the Associated Press. Witnesses recounted agitated Pandas huddling together or pacing the grounds of the reserve. The birds were no longer heard chirping. Somewhere, possibly beyond human senses, a mosaic of displaced nature may possibly have been warning of some sort of imminence.
Maybe it’s something only these animals can sense. Maybe it’s not. God knows that if we had the opportunity to predict earthquakes, some idiot somewhere would surely show up to film it or, dare I suggest such lunacy, take a photo. Have we lost our sense of being? Tidal waves! Still he must take a picture, trying a stupid thing in the name of human existence and expecting a different response? We are insane!
I must admit that some of us are more prepared than others. “Store your heavy keepsakes on lower shelves. Save the top shelves for something you don’t mind being hit with,” Reminds Mary Anderson of the Redwood Times in an article titled “Getting Ready for the Big One.” The “Big One” she is referring to is the inevitable subduction quake along the Juan De Fuca, which runs the length of the United State’s west coast and up past British Columbia. The fault erupts in a megaquake once every 300-600 years. The last in 1700 was so large it sent tsunamis jettisoning across the Pacific Ocean and eventually striking Japan. The quake, when it does hit, is likely to cause mass destruction from San Francisco through Portland, Seattle and as far north as Vancouver B.C. At this rate it will be an unpredictable act of nature.
Ms. Anderson recently participated in the Red Cross workshop “Living on the Fault Line.” The seminar, which is hardly paranoid, reminds you, “Think about what you will need if you’re stuck somewhere away from home because the bridges are out and there are landslides everywhere.” Good plan. Well, what do I need? “Pack a change of clothes, a blanket or sleeping bag, a hand-crank radio that gets the emergency alert channel.” Oh, well of course! So when the big one hits I’ll just jump in my jimmies and hunker down in the rubble in my warm sleeping bag and hand crank my radio, all of which I somehow found in this mass destruction. We’re also reminded, “Be sure and carry a whistle and a small flashlight with you.” It’s impossible to own a whistle without being tempted to blow it constantly. I’m not sure who really wants to be “whistle mom” but now is your chance. “Remember the banks won’t be open and you may not have access to your money.” Finally some real reason for concern.
Yellowstone National Park will eventually destroy the mid west. Thank you somebody. The tragedy that will ensue will ravish many lives and much of North America. The eruptions appear to happen approximately once every million years, the last about 640,000 years ago. What is slightly ironic is that the eruptions of this supervolcano are believed to be reactions to other major shifts of nature. Magnitude 7 earthquakes in Alaska and California have caused disruptions of water flows and earthquakes throughout Yellowstone in the last century.
Long story short, the world is going to end. The real question remains; do we deserve to be warned? In order to know when something will happen we must always know why it’s happening. We’ve got to know what is happening to create such a reaction. Eventually everything is somewhat interconnected, every piece of the puzzle holding some other reaction at bay. Or maybe that thing is actually just inducing that reaction itself by its very existence. If understood correctly, we could term that ignorant existence “life.” So do we really deserve to feel so alive?
Maybe when the world is about to end we’ll get some subtle warning from our friends, the polar bears. They’ll all stop, huddle together and wait for that crashing boom. Maybe we’ll spend our last moments just watching their bizarre behavior, maybe we’ll take a photo or maybe we’ll get the message. Does it matter? Anyway you draw it; we don’t have to be so god damned alone and absolutely to blame when Mother Nature puts us in our place.
Florida sure as hell doesn’t need polar bears either, as writes John Herbert of Hernando Today, a publication of the Tampa Tribune:
“After roaming abandoned Arctic shacks and North Polar ice floes from the North Slope of Alaska to the Norwegian archipelago of Spitsbergen since the 1960s, and some close encounters with stray polar bears, I long ago concluded that we humans need continued protection from the aggressive, speedy and very carnivorous one-ton hairballs. Polar bears can take care of themselves just fine — and scare the wits out of us in the process. They don't need any federal intervention or protection; thank you very much.”
You’re very welcome.
So it appears that here we go, yet again. A divided country will now be forced to face global warming in the name of the polar bear. As endless lawsuits inevitably blame the federal government for protecting the polar bear against global warming while not directly addressing it, Congress will at some point be forced to fix this oxymoron. On one side will stand those who believe in the rational and right while on the other will stand those who fear it may cost them a buck or two. Sound familiar?
Einstein defined insanity as “doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.” A math equation is either correct or incorrect. Without shifting the numbers or calculations it would be impossible to find a solution. This suggests, if not proclaims, that a life without calculation is merely a life without truly rational humanity. To do the same thing twice may actually be a mathematical impossibility, let alone as many times as “over and over again” may suggest. Though it may be possible to miscalculate consistently, if not constantly, when seeking some sort of conclusion. In this sense, Einstein’s insanity is merely a state of mind.
I once had a teacher who informed me that when someone is learning new information “the brain pulses and throbs and ripples and lines begin to form! It’s incredible!” Yes that is, and the thought still horrifies me. My throbbing brain was growing weary of new information and at times I thought my skull might crack. “Feel that! You feel that? Feel that pulse! LET’S LEARN!” So one by one we’d all get our turn to walk up to the dry-erase board and present conclusions from our pre-algebra homework the night before. Numbers divided, added or subtracted. Most of us were wrong, our brains exhausted from their stimulated workouts, but she gladly corrected us and taught us how to do it all correctly. She called teaching “the passing of the throbbing pulse!”
One thing has become clear up to this point. We are a species that learns, uses that knowledge and focuses the latter two tasks toward the goal of accuracy. We’re not the only beings to remain helplessly driven by our associations. In fact we probably have it easier than most living things, a great majority of which end up dead at the hands of their own ignorance to the great lessons of life meant to ensure their survival. Birds don’t just step out of a nest and say “Dude, let’s just like fuckin fly and shit.” Actually, they usually fall on their asses and get up and try again. Or they make like the poor baby duckling my parents spotted off the Columbia River. A blue Herron snatched him from the river water, away from the pack and high into the air. Then, out of nowhere, a bald eagle intercepted and knocked the poor baby duck from the clutches of the Herron. As the duckling fell helplessly toward the water, a second eagle swooped from below and caught the squaking feather-ball in mid-descent. Surely, a meal for their own offspring.
What a fucked up circle of life! Even when we’ve been unfairly handed the wrong cards our ignorance still manages to fuck us over. “No Ashley! How many times do I have to show you?” Our math teacher was slightly impatient but to her credit Ashley never really got it. Every time she was told to add she would merely divide. Subtraction was indivisible. When told to multiply she’d stupefy. Mind you, Ashley didn’t give a shit. Ashley was a cool eighth grader, sporting bright red hair and an orange racecar jumpsuit. She had an iPod. Ashley wasn’t passing the throbbing pulse.
So why should she? “I get math, but what does it all mean?” I asked. Teacher merely smiled, “Neither you, nor I will ever know.” I still think that a stupid answer to a very obvious opportunity for that profound “teacher” moment that every educator looks forward to. We’ve all been fed that bullshit paragraph of overtly profound, sweeping sentences that avert the reality of uncertainty. Instead she stuck with the obvious, and probably true, sentiment that neither of us really knew quite what to do with this stimulating yet seemingly arbitrary tapestry of second-hand knowledge.
When a subduction earthquake struck off the coast of Indonesia in December 2004, an aftershock of tsunamis leveled coastlines throughout the region. Nearly a quarter of a million people were killed in what has been logged as the deadliest natural disaster in human history. Few saw it coming. Despite the magnitude 9.2 earthquake hours before, business continued. Despite nearly a mile of previously unexposed beach, many wandered toward the receding waves with ignorant curiosity. Even as the waves began crashing past their usual shorelines many still failed to heed the now obvious warning. In one video of the tragic event a camcorder captures the moment a dubious tourist pulls his digital camera out to take a close-up photo of the incoming wave. As he waits for the flash on his camera to charge a wave engulfs him and every other visible structure so close to the point of impact.
All the while the ancient tribes inhabiting the islands of the Indian Ocean near the epicenter of the massive quake saw things differently. Long before the waves crashed unto their beaches the tribes had fled to higher ground in fear of the massive destruction. The warnings found on these islands were reiterated in responses throughout Southeast Asia and as far away as East Africa. Few land roaming animals faced casualties or seemed caught off guard at the approach of the killer waves. There are many theories as to why this primal phenomenon occurs with animals, the most popular being their heightened sense of hearing and smell that may react to the vibrations and electromagnetic changes in the atmosphere. This hypothesis has never been successfully recreated while many scientists have brushed the theory away as purely a collection of “anecdotes.” In 2005, National Geograpahic reported a flood of eyewitness accounts regarding animals fleeing inland, refusing to leave their private zoo enclosures or heading toward higher ground. It was also hard to deny that the clean up efforts in much of the region faced very few if any animal carcasses.
Let’s not forget those damn pandas! Just weeks ago, British tourists exploring the Woo-Long National Reserve in China started noticing strange behavior amongst the pandas. The pandas “had been really lazy and just eaten a little bit of bamboo, and all of a sudden they were parading around their pen,” told a very jolly and animate Diane Etkins to the Associated Press. Witnesses recounted agitated Pandas huddling together or pacing the grounds of the reserve. The birds were no longer heard chirping. Somewhere, possibly beyond human senses, a mosaic of displaced nature may possibly have been warning of some sort of imminence.
Maybe it’s something only these animals can sense. Maybe it’s not. God knows that if we had the opportunity to predict earthquakes, some idiot somewhere would surely show up to film it or, dare I suggest such lunacy, take a photo. Have we lost our sense of being? Tidal waves! Still he must take a picture, trying a stupid thing in the name of human existence and expecting a different response? We are insane!
I must admit that some of us are more prepared than others. “Store your heavy keepsakes on lower shelves. Save the top shelves for something you don’t mind being hit with,” Reminds Mary Anderson of the Redwood Times in an article titled “Getting Ready for the Big One.” The “Big One” she is referring to is the inevitable subduction quake along the Juan De Fuca, which runs the length of the United State’s west coast and up past British Columbia. The fault erupts in a megaquake once every 300-600 years. The last in 1700 was so large it sent tsunamis jettisoning across the Pacific Ocean and eventually striking Japan. The quake, when it does hit, is likely to cause mass destruction from San Francisco through Portland, Seattle and as far north as Vancouver B.C. At this rate it will be an unpredictable act of nature.
Ms. Anderson recently participated in the Red Cross workshop “Living on the Fault Line.” The seminar, which is hardly paranoid, reminds you, “Think about what you will need if you’re stuck somewhere away from home because the bridges are out and there are landslides everywhere.” Good plan. Well, what do I need? “Pack a change of clothes, a blanket or sleeping bag, a hand-crank radio that gets the emergency alert channel.” Oh, well of course! So when the big one hits I’ll just jump in my jimmies and hunker down in the rubble in my warm sleeping bag and hand crank my radio, all of which I somehow found in this mass destruction. We’re also reminded, “Be sure and carry a whistle and a small flashlight with you.” It’s impossible to own a whistle without being tempted to blow it constantly. I’m not sure who really wants to be “whistle mom” but now is your chance. “Remember the banks won’t be open and you may not have access to your money.” Finally some real reason for concern.
Yellowstone National Park will eventually destroy the mid west. Thank you somebody. The tragedy that will ensue will ravish many lives and much of North America. The eruptions appear to happen approximately once every million years, the last about 640,000 years ago. What is slightly ironic is that the eruptions of this supervolcano are believed to be reactions to other major shifts of nature. Magnitude 7 earthquakes in Alaska and California have caused disruptions of water flows and earthquakes throughout Yellowstone in the last century.
Long story short, the world is going to end. The real question remains; do we deserve to be warned? In order to know when something will happen we must always know why it’s happening. We’ve got to know what is happening to create such a reaction. Eventually everything is somewhat interconnected, every piece of the puzzle holding some other reaction at bay. Or maybe that thing is actually just inducing that reaction itself by its very existence. If understood correctly, we could term that ignorant existence “life.” So do we really deserve to feel so alive?
Maybe when the world is about to end we’ll get some subtle warning from our friends, the polar bears. They’ll all stop, huddle together and wait for that crashing boom. Maybe we’ll spend our last moments just watching their bizarre behavior, maybe we’ll take a photo or maybe we’ll get the message. Does it matter? Anyway you draw it; we don’t have to be so god damned alone and absolutely to blame when Mother Nature puts us in our place.
Wednesday, April 23, 2008
The Week Ahead
Aries (March 21-April 19)
While trapped in the bathroom of a run-down Best Western in Vancouver, BC, last summer, I was presented with a very conflicting decision. There was no toilet paper and the only two possible substitutions at my fingertips were either my clean towel, which I intended to take with me to the beach, or the pages of the ever ominous hotel bible that had been left sitting by the bathroom sink. Obviously I chose the latter, and as the pages of Leviticus cleansed my nethers I received a small but shockingly sharp paper cut on my anus. You, dearest Aries, will have a similar affirmation that God sucks and lacks a sense of humor sometime this week.
Taurus (April 20-May 20)
This week is the perfect week for you to get away with various petty crimes - and not get caught! Saturn is getting pretty sick of all those stupid rings of flying rocks, and as she boils over you’ll begin to notice that people piss you off. I say that you take out your aggression this week on anyone and everyone who ticks you the wrong way. Feel free to punch, stab, kick, bite, piss, slap, and spit your way through Saturn’s hissy fit. You can get away with anything this week, so why the fuck not?
Gemini (May 21- June 20)
Last summer I found myself driving fifty miles every weekend from Portland, Oregon, to Castle Rock, Washington, to do yard work and mutilate previously healthy shrubs. On my way to and from this mid-Washington oasis, I would pass the Castle Rock Christian Church. This institution of holy worship had one of those tacky signboards that many churches and Wal-Mart’s tout. The message on this placard was quite specific, “A faith that costs nothing and demands nothing is worth nothing.” While Webster’s Revised Unabridged Dictionary gives roughly seven variations as to the true definition of faith, the general understanding appears to be that faith itself is an allegiance to truth, or merely truth itself. So my goal for you dear Gemini is to call Castle Rock Christian Church at 360.274.6771 and ask them for information on how to pay the demands of your search for truth. Does funding our schools to teach metaphysics that will ultimately help human understanding of the universe count? Does a belief in science to preserve our crumbling world meet these demands? I’m not a Gemini, so I beg of you to get back to me.
Cancer (June 21-July 22)
Your outlook for the week is going to cost you a few bucks. Send me an email and we can work out the appropriate price.
Leo (July 23-August 22)
Your obsession with scat play is going to grow dire this week and I’m not sure there is much I can say to stop you from performing this quite horrific and potentially unhealthy sexual activity. Coprohagia can have many unhealthy consequences, especially when practiced between two humans. Consent is not cleansing. So my suggestion is that you turn your attention to all the wonderful piles of animal feces available on the streets of New York. I did some Wikipedia research on the subject just for you, so I will quote Ralph A. Lewin, “"... consumption of fresh, warm camel feces has been recommended by Bedouins as a remedy for bacterial dysentery; its efficacy (probably attributable to the antibiotic subtilisin from Bacillus subtilis) was confirmed by German soldiers in Africa during World War II." Camel rides are available daily at the Bronx zoo beginning at 11 am. Protect yourself when biting brown.
Virgo (August 23-September 22)
You are far too cynical to read something as daft as my blog, but you’re also a very horny zodiac so I will take note of the slim possibility that my entrancing sexual existence has lured you to my website. With that said, this week will be pretty good for you. Everyone else is going to be pretty pissed off, so you’ll actually be the happy one the next few days. This will be a good shift in direction for you. You’ll bask in the “you look good today” or “you have a really pretty smile” up-beat comments that only happy people seem to draw. Just don’t get too excited about this newfound attention. I’ve been talking with the stars and it seems like you have a very grim, hopeless life ahead of you.
Libra (September 23-October 22)
Crazy Beans, my current roommate, has the fattest cat I’ve ever seen in my entire life. She’s so fat that Crazy must manually wipe her ass after every shit because she can’t lick it clean like most crazy roommates… I mean cats. Crazy Beans recently put the cat on a strict diet to try and counter this serious weight problem. Fat Cat isn’t happy. Every time I enter the kitchen, there she is, sitting by the cabinet containing her food supply and pounding the door open with her head. Her wails and screams, muffled by her fatty cat cheeks, often continue throughout the evening until Crazy Beans is forced to feed the damn thing. But I’ve noticed something strange since this diet began; it’s not working folks! The cat is still as fat as ever, and I’ve grown suspicious of foul play on part of the cat. This was when I started to notice something quite odd about the grass in the backyard. Certain sections of the yard looked freshly mowed while others were growing rapidly. A couple days ago I peeked out the window and there she was, Fat Cat, munching away at the grass with frightening tenacity. After she’d cleared a good three-squared feet of lawn I christened her Cow Cat. Long story short, I’m getting sick of writing horoscopes.
Scorpio (October 23-November 21)
You guys are really only good for eating candy and turkey, your two main hobbies during your lazy zodiac season. So listen up you glutton fatties! It’s time to quit this morbid hobby of stuffing your fat little faces with every little crumb you can find and get your sloppy selves to the gym for some quality time with our good old friend the treadmill. Mars is looking particularly red and tasty this week, so there will be lots of temptation to eat bright red things like apples or balloons. Fight the temptations god damn it! Google the Master Cleanser diet and clean up your sloppy act.
Sagittarius (November 22-December 21)
Since the jarring revelation the Britney Spears was born on December, 2nd, It was come to my attention that your zodiac is in serious need of public relations work. Come to think of it, you’re left in the ranks of Keith Richards, Jane Fonda, Tyra Banks and Beau Bridges. Your image is tainted and as far as I’m concerned you’re just rock-bottom trash at this point. So my task for you this week is quite simple; pick a new zodiac. Do everything you can this week to denounce your star sign. Should this mean laser surgery to remove all those Sag-related tats or the theft of another non-Sagittarius identity, go for it! You need to remove yourself from this dying sign and celebrate your birth in a season that’s not so fucking cliché.
Capricorn (December 11-January 19)
I had a talk with Venus last night and we decided that you’re not taking shit seriously. So Venus agreed to do you a little favor and give you some ass smackin’ this week, and you fucking deserve it. Watch your back, bitch.
Aquarius (January 20-February 18)
This week you’re going to pay back your mom on that loan you took, finish packing up your shit so that you can hide it from Crazy Beans (your klepto soon-to-be former roommate with an unhealthy obsession with cats), finish your weekly blog post on time, drink wine you sick alcoholic, buy that bag from Marc Jacobs that you ABSOLUTLY MUST HAVE, fuck your manager, again, and above all continue to be the most absolutely fabulous person in the whole world.
Pisces (February 19-March 20)
If you haven’t seen it already, this week I highly advise you to watch James Cameron’s failed television series, Dark Angel. Set some twenty years in the future, the backdrop for this television show is the United States post-terrorist attack that removed personal freedoms and sent everyone into poverty. Max, played by the genius Jessica Alba, is a genetically engineered soldier made and trained to blend into the world as a regular human being. She is, of course, on the lamb. As Max reveals the corruption of the United States government and starts to build momentum in seeking civil rights and personal freedoms for her transgenic freak friends, the government uses its power over social forums to turn citizens against her and her crew, and of course the series gets cancelled (worth noting that there really are only so many times that one can stomach Alba’s line “I’m just a broken girl, tryin’ to make it in a broken world”). The irony is that the series premiered in 2000 on Fox and only lasted two seasons. Your goal for the next five seconds is to figure out why.
While trapped in the bathroom of a run-down Best Western in Vancouver, BC, last summer, I was presented with a very conflicting decision. There was no toilet paper and the only two possible substitutions at my fingertips were either my clean towel, which I intended to take with me to the beach, or the pages of the ever ominous hotel bible that had been left sitting by the bathroom sink. Obviously I chose the latter, and as the pages of Leviticus cleansed my nethers I received a small but shockingly sharp paper cut on my anus. You, dearest Aries, will have a similar affirmation that God sucks and lacks a sense of humor sometime this week.
Taurus (April 20-May 20)
This week is the perfect week for you to get away with various petty crimes - and not get caught! Saturn is getting pretty sick of all those stupid rings of flying rocks, and as she boils over you’ll begin to notice that people piss you off. I say that you take out your aggression this week on anyone and everyone who ticks you the wrong way. Feel free to punch, stab, kick, bite, piss, slap, and spit your way through Saturn’s hissy fit. You can get away with anything this week, so why the fuck not?
Gemini (May 21- June 20)
Last summer I found myself driving fifty miles every weekend from Portland, Oregon, to Castle Rock, Washington, to do yard work and mutilate previously healthy shrubs. On my way to and from this mid-Washington oasis, I would pass the Castle Rock Christian Church. This institution of holy worship had one of those tacky signboards that many churches and Wal-Mart’s tout. The message on this placard was quite specific, “A faith that costs nothing and demands nothing is worth nothing.” While Webster’s Revised Unabridged Dictionary gives roughly seven variations as to the true definition of faith, the general understanding appears to be that faith itself is an allegiance to truth, or merely truth itself. So my goal for you dear Gemini is to call Castle Rock Christian Church at 360.274.6771 and ask them for information on how to pay the demands of your search for truth. Does funding our schools to teach metaphysics that will ultimately help human understanding of the universe count? Does a belief in science to preserve our crumbling world meet these demands? I’m not a Gemini, so I beg of you to get back to me.
Cancer (June 21-July 22)
Your outlook for the week is going to cost you a few bucks. Send me an email and we can work out the appropriate price.
Leo (July 23-August 22)
Your obsession with scat play is going to grow dire this week and I’m not sure there is much I can say to stop you from performing this quite horrific and potentially unhealthy sexual activity. Coprohagia can have many unhealthy consequences, especially when practiced between two humans. Consent is not cleansing. So my suggestion is that you turn your attention to all the wonderful piles of animal feces available on the streets of New York. I did some Wikipedia research on the subject just for you, so I will quote Ralph A. Lewin, “"... consumption of fresh, warm camel feces has been recommended by Bedouins as a remedy for bacterial dysentery; its efficacy (probably attributable to the antibiotic subtilisin from Bacillus subtilis) was confirmed by German soldiers in Africa during World War II." Camel rides are available daily at the Bronx zoo beginning at 11 am. Protect yourself when biting brown.
Virgo (August 23-September 22)
You are far too cynical to read something as daft as my blog, but you’re also a very horny zodiac so I will take note of the slim possibility that my entrancing sexual existence has lured you to my website. With that said, this week will be pretty good for you. Everyone else is going to be pretty pissed off, so you’ll actually be the happy one the next few days. This will be a good shift in direction for you. You’ll bask in the “you look good today” or “you have a really pretty smile” up-beat comments that only happy people seem to draw. Just don’t get too excited about this newfound attention. I’ve been talking with the stars and it seems like you have a very grim, hopeless life ahead of you.
Libra (September 23-October 22)
Crazy Beans, my current roommate, has the fattest cat I’ve ever seen in my entire life. She’s so fat that Crazy must manually wipe her ass after every shit because she can’t lick it clean like most crazy roommates… I mean cats. Crazy Beans recently put the cat on a strict diet to try and counter this serious weight problem. Fat Cat isn’t happy. Every time I enter the kitchen, there she is, sitting by the cabinet containing her food supply and pounding the door open with her head. Her wails and screams, muffled by her fatty cat cheeks, often continue throughout the evening until Crazy Beans is forced to feed the damn thing. But I’ve noticed something strange since this diet began; it’s not working folks! The cat is still as fat as ever, and I’ve grown suspicious of foul play on part of the cat. This was when I started to notice something quite odd about the grass in the backyard. Certain sections of the yard looked freshly mowed while others were growing rapidly. A couple days ago I peeked out the window and there she was, Fat Cat, munching away at the grass with frightening tenacity. After she’d cleared a good three-squared feet of lawn I christened her Cow Cat. Long story short, I’m getting sick of writing horoscopes.
Scorpio (October 23-November 21)
You guys are really only good for eating candy and turkey, your two main hobbies during your lazy zodiac season. So listen up you glutton fatties! It’s time to quit this morbid hobby of stuffing your fat little faces with every little crumb you can find and get your sloppy selves to the gym for some quality time with our good old friend the treadmill. Mars is looking particularly red and tasty this week, so there will be lots of temptation to eat bright red things like apples or balloons. Fight the temptations god damn it! Google the Master Cleanser diet and clean up your sloppy act.
Sagittarius (November 22-December 21)
Since the jarring revelation the Britney Spears was born on December, 2nd, It was come to my attention that your zodiac is in serious need of public relations work. Come to think of it, you’re left in the ranks of Keith Richards, Jane Fonda, Tyra Banks and Beau Bridges. Your image is tainted and as far as I’m concerned you’re just rock-bottom trash at this point. So my task for you this week is quite simple; pick a new zodiac. Do everything you can this week to denounce your star sign. Should this mean laser surgery to remove all those Sag-related tats or the theft of another non-Sagittarius identity, go for it! You need to remove yourself from this dying sign and celebrate your birth in a season that’s not so fucking cliché.
Capricorn (December 11-January 19)
I had a talk with Venus last night and we decided that you’re not taking shit seriously. So Venus agreed to do you a little favor and give you some ass smackin’ this week, and you fucking deserve it. Watch your back, bitch.
Aquarius (January 20-February 18)
This week you’re going to pay back your mom on that loan you took, finish packing up your shit so that you can hide it from Crazy Beans (your klepto soon-to-be former roommate with an unhealthy obsession with cats), finish your weekly blog post on time, drink wine you sick alcoholic, buy that bag from Marc Jacobs that you ABSOLUTLY MUST HAVE, fuck your manager, again, and above all continue to be the most absolutely fabulous person in the whole world.
Pisces (February 19-March 20)
If you haven’t seen it already, this week I highly advise you to watch James Cameron’s failed television series, Dark Angel. Set some twenty years in the future, the backdrop for this television show is the United States post-terrorist attack that removed personal freedoms and sent everyone into poverty. Max, played by the genius Jessica Alba, is a genetically engineered soldier made and trained to blend into the world as a regular human being. She is, of course, on the lamb. As Max reveals the corruption of the United States government and starts to build momentum in seeking civil rights and personal freedoms for her transgenic freak friends, the government uses its power over social forums to turn citizens against her and her crew, and of course the series gets cancelled (worth noting that there really are only so many times that one can stomach Alba’s line “I’m just a broken girl, tryin’ to make it in a broken world”). The irony is that the series premiered in 2000 on Fox and only lasted two seasons. Your goal for the next five seconds is to figure out why.
Wednesday, April 9, 2008
Wednesday, April 2, 2008
Break, Quit, Stop, Free
When held in captivity, circus elephants begin to sway. They bob their heads from left to right while their legs, tethered to chains, often remain motionless. This is common activity for circus elephants, most of which get their only exercise while performing or training. These activities are usually wrought with abuse, the elephants whipped with hooked sticks to initiate the proper, amusing response. When confronted with the calm of neither of these two tasks, circus elephants sway their heads from left to right. Sometimes they just pull helplessly at their chains.
At Banana Republic, I didn’t really sway my head to and fro. I did, however, tap my foot aimlessly on the floor during those long days when people didn’t feel like buying things. It turns out that it is entirely possible to fold, and refold, an entire men’s section of a clothing store and still find yourself without anything to do, five hours of your shift remaining. For some delusional reason I believed that my job at Banana would be, dare I say it, glamorous? This may have been due to my previous stock shift at Hollister with my alcoholic manager, Trisha. My first day on the job she ran in shaking a Dasani bottle filled with lime green liquid as though it were a maraca, singing a song with no consistent melody and only one lyric, “Margarita time!” Thirty minutes later and Trisha was passed out under the stock desk. With all due respect Banana had a little more class, but I had ulterior motives for taking a job in such a dense industry.
Determined to have employment that would transfer me to New York City, I began what would become a year and a half of Banana Time - a self-induced and seemingly endless sentence to the prison of Gap Inc. It didn’t come with standardized jumpsuits or leg shackles, the latter a great disappointment, but it did involve a 40% discount to stock up on chinos and argyle. “Stock up mother fuckers!” Okay, that was never said, but it was defiantly implied. Our employee numbers knocked off a buck or two, but sometimes they did nothing. It was still required that employees “must use their number on every purchase,” even if we didn’t receive a discount. This leaves me quite positive that Banana has a big chart somewhere – titled “$UCKER MONEY!OMGLOL” - tracking how many dollars were transferred to the employee’s paycheck and then back into the company’s pocket. Of all the numbers and percentages thrown at me, this was one I was never given.
My manager was Jane Sunflower and let me assure you, that woman was a trip. She was your usual corporate carbon copy of what the perfect woman should be. What set her aside was that she actually was that woman. Nothing about her public work demeanor stayed exclusively at the job. She showed it all and let me tell you, it wasn’t much. Jane always had a smile on her face, even when she was yelling at you. She’d never raise her voice above the decibel of office appropriate, but her eyes would open just wide enough to compensate both her smile and her tone.
In the corporate world you can’t have your Jane without your Dick, and what a dick he was. Smarmy and about as narcissistic as they come, Dick was so far up his own ass that he’d managed to still push bullshit out of his own mouth. He was very lingual in the corporate talk but when it came to his personal nature he was merely a sad, lonesome and entirely jaded gay male. “Look at this one!” he screeched on my first day. “Your name must be Ken!” “No, it’s not. I’m Andy.” “No… KEN, silly! I like him already.” “I’m sorry I don’t get it.” “Oh come now! Didn’t you ever play with Barbies?” I did, but that was a whole separate issue. “No, sorry. Never did.” That morning I got a whole lot of Dick as he insisted on informing me of the Barbie family tree.
Dick and Jane had a way of sneaking up behind you as you worked to “observe.” Despite having strong sales I was always getting corrected on the information I presented to customers. I’d made a point of informing a woman that several of the sweaters she was looking at for her husband were woven with angora. The lady wasn’t happy to hear that, nor did I blame her, but of course I’d fucked up. “Andy, you can’t give information like that and fail to follow up,” Jane Sunflower yelled in her placid, wide-eyed demure. “All I told her was that there’s rabbit hair in the sweater,” I responded, “She was wearing a PETA sweater.” “Yes, of course, but you failed to give her the full information on Banana Republic’s angora! It’s a high quality fiber and we carefully comb each rabbit and use the hairs that fall out.” BULL SHIT! She continued, “Besides, we would never condone the slaughter of a cute fuzzy rabbit to wear as a sweater!” “Why not? We kill cows and turn them into coats. Or do we just lightly shave the skin off until they grow some more?” “Oh Andy, you’re such a joker,” she lied, visibly struggling to giggle. “Anyways, that’s different! We eat those cows.”
So how does a person survive making just above minimum wage while Dick and Jane push Banana up your ass? Never fear! The ever-attainable Banana Card is here. I was always told that there was a possible Banana Card with every customer who walked into the store. It was all about knowing what, how and when to ask. The Banana Card, which touted a light 20% interest rate, was easily the most tracked and essential point of my existence at Banana Republic. We would be reminded that company statistics proved that it took up to three or four attempts at offering the card before a customer would say yes. Where these statistics came from and how the numbers crunched together in any scientific manner (be it asking a select pool of customers how many times they were offered the card before their acceptance maybe?), it was all tailored perfectly to pushing us to ask. And ask again. And ask some more after that, and never stop asking until somebody, one out of who gives a fuck, finally said yes.
We were pushed hard to open these cards every shift. We’d goal ourselves for the day and each application processed was a $1.50 “spiff” on our paycheck. It was just enough money to not add up to much at all yet make you believe that maybe it could. Some people were intense about that card and everything it meant. Watching our cashier Raekay open a card was all the proof I ever needed to prove that Banana Republic was brainwashing associates to sales perfection. It would always start with the greeting, then she’d say, “Would you be interested in opening a Banana Card today and save yourself 15% on your purchase?” While most people would see through her glossy white smile of straight teeth, shimmering lipstick and big bright eyes that absolutely never blinked during transaction, some people, mostly lonely single men, would pause for that one single instant before they could say no, and with that they had already fallen into the trap that was Raekay’s relentless Banana Card sales pitch.
“You’ll also receive 10% off at Banana Republic, Gap and Old Navy again after purchase, as well as another 15% off in the mail when you receive your card. You can also use your card online at BananaRepublic.com and receive 15% off, as well as free shipping on orders over $50...”
“Umm, I’m not sure that...”
“…Plus,” smile, and daddy’s girl voice in the fullest swing yet. No blinks. “…For every $200 you spend in store, you’ll receive $10 back in the mail as well as various coupons for special offers in store. On the month of your birthday we’ll give you $15 off your purchase, and if you spend $800 dollars in a calendar year, you’ll become a member of our Lux Membership…” here we go, the Lux card … “…and with that you’ll receive free shipping from online, free alterations on all your Banana Republic clothing, and $25 back on every $500 dollars you spend in our store!”
“Well…”
Her smile was in full detail and finally, without any energy or dignity left to try and blink if she wanted to, she’d close it with “so let’s get you started on that today!” And in her hand would appear a pen and an application shimmering in bright yellow, covered in coupons and fine print. That customer, 99% of the time, would crumble in her hands and open up a line of credit, putting themselves into the debt of Banana Republic. Raekay, after taxes, would make just about one dollar. But more disturbing were those times, about 1% of them, when the customer would still say no. Sometimes the intensity of Raekay’s performance stopped the transaction altogether. The sentences flowing from deep in her throat, brain and soul could turn the air sour. I once watched silently as a lady merely walked from the counter. Suddenly, at least for this customer, the idea of buying clothes just didn’t seem enjoyable anymore. The pain in Raekay’s voice was audible, but for some reason she just kept throwing the sales pitch at the retreating customer.
While political discussions were essentially forbidden in Banana Republic, Friday’s weekly Iraq protest in Portland’s Pioneer Square always seemed to bring a voice or two to the discussion table. One Friday I’d offended Jane by saying that I thought conservatives were just angry people who had bad sex (For the record folks, that statement is a proven fact). She told me that I was being inappropriate. I asked if she was conservative. “Yes, I’m a conservative,” Jane proclaimed in the most candid discussion we ever had. “People destroy people, it’s true. But mostly people destroy themselves. I refuse to live in a world where I must pay for other people’s mistakes. Yes, there are tremendous problems in the world, but it’s not my fault.” I didn’t respond. At the time I had nothing to say, but I knew that nothing I could say really had any place in the walls of “the Banana Republic.”
Had I really thought hard I would have asked in response, “What replaces the cynicism of the conservative?” The problem remains that even when we discount all the misfortune of the world as self-induced hardship, where is the solution? When everyone deserves to suffer for the crime of remaining uninspired in a world where virtuous success stories are outnumbered, there is no solution. The only solution discounts the entire argument to begin with. If we could possibly admit that people’s unsuccessful attempts at life are a product of something our society could fix, or maybe just improve, then it seems the whole idea of finding relentless success to the relentless employee is merely a shackle. In this worldview every failed citizen’s hopelessness is not justified, it’s validated. For Jane, this was not just the point of her job; it was the purpose of her life. She was seeking relentless success. Ever more disturbing was that she was trying to find it at Banana Republic.
I don’t know what exactly it was that inspired me to fall to the ground one summer afternoon, but I did. The sun was glaring through the massive, windowed walls, yet none of the heat could reach my skin. The perfectly conditioned and entirely vapid room was absorbing any notion of sun, turning invigorating rays of light into stagnant pools of cool; faux shade at its worst. I could do nothing but stand all day behind the cash registers processing one customer after another, each one with a desired dollar amount statistically traced from their entrance into the store. They could feel the heat no more than I, but I kept warming with each passing moment. I was standing aimlessly behind the register, pretending with ease to be doing something while finding that doing nothing produced no more or less result. The sun was beating down on me from behind the glass, begging for something more authentic than a perfect temperature.
I couldn’t get Jane’s words of wisdom out of my head. Sitting in the break area, a dense corner filled with retired display furniture and pamphlets on Banana personal success called “behind the seams,” I couldn’t help but overhear Jane’s smile explain that the success of Banana Republic lay in our ability to be 100% all the time.
“If we were doing one hundred percent at all moments, our goals would be attainable. It’s always an act of being so many different people in one day. You have to read your customer cues and relate to them at all times. By listening, you can become the person that they themselves will relate to.”
“You know, I’ve never really thought of it that way!” chimed Dick, enough flavor and honesty in his voice to make the peach crepe I was consuming taste like unsanitary asshole. I was still confused by the philosophy of Jane’s argument. All my time at Banana I was told to be myself. That I was hired because of who I was, not because of my ability to self adjust to please the perceptions of others.
“I find myself exhausted when I leave work,” I said, not realizing I was even speaking out loud. “I find myself losing track of myself with all these personalities. It takes so much of my energy switching between people, and at the end of the day I just forget who I was when I walked in the door that morning.” I could feel my words vibrate deep in my throat, slipping out in some desperate attempt for compassion. I couldn’t help but traverse the large stencil painting of a palm tree plastered of the break corner’s wall. There were thin branches climbing up the tall wall, each one with a carefully placed palm leaf to provide a canopy against the opaque orange, a color that seemed to do little to brighten or darken the walls.
“I think for someone with an acting background like yourself, you would have an advantage. Think of this store like the theater. When the doors open, the curtain goes up. Our customers are the audience and we help them through the show. You don’t see the stagehands. We don’t keep building the set after the curtain goes up. When you think of it that way, you can see how giving one hundred percent is attainable.”
My focus was still plastered to the ironic palm tree. One branch in particular crept off to the left in the most peculiar fashion, lower than the rest and almost perpendicular. The large leafy end landed in a corner, the stenciled palm shared by two walls of different direction. As she spoke, I could feel that my emotions had slipped away from Jane’s increasingly opaque smile. They were clinging like the obscure palm leaf to two walls in the hopes of finding an impossible third dimension.
I stood at the cash registers, never having realized that sunlight could be so two dimensional in the conditioned rays. My brain had lost all dimension of reality, asking every customer a script of questions that seemed so short of my own reality that I eventually became more a liar than an actor. What had we become? Between the customers and the company, I was the pawn; the one who got to sugarcoat the sun with a smile and make it all seem real in the eyes of the venturing skeptic.
So I fell. I stood staring at my register, no longer willing or able to move. I wouldn’t do it, and with no immediate way out in sight I took the fall with the full hope and intention that it would hurt me. I leaned slowly to my back right and let gravity pull me as far away from the stage as possible. The iconic glare of the bright register screen etched into my retinas, I slipped into the air, falling backwards by neither choice nor force. Rather I had given up. I had decided that I wouldn’t do this today, and probably not tomorrow. Maybe the day after by sheer lack of reasonable choice, but for now I was done, flying backwards through the air until my head and body landed firmly on the wood floor with a blunt force hard enough to stop the show.
The post-circus head sway continues. It only takes a single day to experience the monotonous lifestyle of Corporate America. A year to push some like myself over the edge. It never changes. You aren’t rewarded for innovation of thought unless it’s profitable, maybe if it’s inspirational since inspiration can be turned into profit. The only art in Corporate America is the theater it creates. Standing aimlessly on a sales floor, associates tap their feet or chew their nails when the show takes a break. They bob their heads from left to right, like circus elephants. Sometimes they just pull at their chains.
Corporate America thinks it has found the golden key to success. Smiles are dotted on friendly faces and colorful political correctness fills every exchange. In this world we’ve created a diversity that’s merely a form of translation. We may all say things differently but we’re all reading the same script. The conservatism is born in our ability to hold ourselves back in fear of making the wrong decision. We don’t want to say or do the wrong thing. We just don’t want to offend anybody. We look at 100% and see it as attainable purity in any given moment.
In reality we can only make the decisions that we do, and the world doesn’t punish us for making the right or the wrong ones. Only we can do that. Life can’t be censored or silenced. People can’t transcend their own humanity, denying their instincts in search of some idealistic propriety. Furthermore, what does our society have to say for itself when this bullshit infects something as seemingly simple as buying some chinos and argyle? If we could stop second guessing life as it walks toward us then maybe we could break the shackles at our feet, quit this silly performance, stop the private torture, and free ourselves from this captivity.
At Banana Republic, I didn’t really sway my head to and fro. I did, however, tap my foot aimlessly on the floor during those long days when people didn’t feel like buying things. It turns out that it is entirely possible to fold, and refold, an entire men’s section of a clothing store and still find yourself without anything to do, five hours of your shift remaining. For some delusional reason I believed that my job at Banana would be, dare I say it, glamorous? This may have been due to my previous stock shift at Hollister with my alcoholic manager, Trisha. My first day on the job she ran in shaking a Dasani bottle filled with lime green liquid as though it were a maraca, singing a song with no consistent melody and only one lyric, “Margarita time!” Thirty minutes later and Trisha was passed out under the stock desk. With all due respect Banana had a little more class, but I had ulterior motives for taking a job in such a dense industry.
Determined to have employment that would transfer me to New York City, I began what would become a year and a half of Banana Time - a self-induced and seemingly endless sentence to the prison of Gap Inc. It didn’t come with standardized jumpsuits or leg shackles, the latter a great disappointment, but it did involve a 40% discount to stock up on chinos and argyle. “Stock up mother fuckers!” Okay, that was never said, but it was defiantly implied. Our employee numbers knocked off a buck or two, but sometimes they did nothing. It was still required that employees “must use their number on every purchase,” even if we didn’t receive a discount. This leaves me quite positive that Banana has a big chart somewhere – titled “$UCKER MONEY!OMGLOL” - tracking how many dollars were transferred to the employee’s paycheck and then back into the company’s pocket. Of all the numbers and percentages thrown at me, this was one I was never given.
My manager was Jane Sunflower and let me assure you, that woman was a trip. She was your usual corporate carbon copy of what the perfect woman should be. What set her aside was that she actually was that woman. Nothing about her public work demeanor stayed exclusively at the job. She showed it all and let me tell you, it wasn’t much. Jane always had a smile on her face, even when she was yelling at you. She’d never raise her voice above the decibel of office appropriate, but her eyes would open just wide enough to compensate both her smile and her tone.
In the corporate world you can’t have your Jane without your Dick, and what a dick he was. Smarmy and about as narcissistic as they come, Dick was so far up his own ass that he’d managed to still push bullshit out of his own mouth. He was very lingual in the corporate talk but when it came to his personal nature he was merely a sad, lonesome and entirely jaded gay male. “Look at this one!” he screeched on my first day. “Your name must be Ken!” “No, it’s not. I’m Andy.” “No… KEN, silly! I like him already.” “I’m sorry I don’t get it.” “Oh come now! Didn’t you ever play with Barbies?” I did, but that was a whole separate issue. “No, sorry. Never did.” That morning I got a whole lot of Dick as he insisted on informing me of the Barbie family tree.
Dick and Jane had a way of sneaking up behind you as you worked to “observe.” Despite having strong sales I was always getting corrected on the information I presented to customers. I’d made a point of informing a woman that several of the sweaters she was looking at for her husband were woven with angora. The lady wasn’t happy to hear that, nor did I blame her, but of course I’d fucked up. “Andy, you can’t give information like that and fail to follow up,” Jane Sunflower yelled in her placid, wide-eyed demure. “All I told her was that there’s rabbit hair in the sweater,” I responded, “She was wearing a PETA sweater.” “Yes, of course, but you failed to give her the full information on Banana Republic’s angora! It’s a high quality fiber and we carefully comb each rabbit and use the hairs that fall out.” BULL SHIT! She continued, “Besides, we would never condone the slaughter of a cute fuzzy rabbit to wear as a sweater!” “Why not? We kill cows and turn them into coats. Or do we just lightly shave the skin off until they grow some more?” “Oh Andy, you’re such a joker,” she lied, visibly struggling to giggle. “Anyways, that’s different! We eat those cows.”
So how does a person survive making just above minimum wage while Dick and Jane push Banana up your ass? Never fear! The ever-attainable Banana Card is here. I was always told that there was a possible Banana Card with every customer who walked into the store. It was all about knowing what, how and when to ask. The Banana Card, which touted a light 20% interest rate, was easily the most tracked and essential point of my existence at Banana Republic. We would be reminded that company statistics proved that it took up to three or four attempts at offering the card before a customer would say yes. Where these statistics came from and how the numbers crunched together in any scientific manner (be it asking a select pool of customers how many times they were offered the card before their acceptance maybe?), it was all tailored perfectly to pushing us to ask. And ask again. And ask some more after that, and never stop asking until somebody, one out of who gives a fuck, finally said yes.
We were pushed hard to open these cards every shift. We’d goal ourselves for the day and each application processed was a $1.50 “spiff” on our paycheck. It was just enough money to not add up to much at all yet make you believe that maybe it could. Some people were intense about that card and everything it meant. Watching our cashier Raekay open a card was all the proof I ever needed to prove that Banana Republic was brainwashing associates to sales perfection. It would always start with the greeting, then she’d say, “Would you be interested in opening a Banana Card today and save yourself 15% on your purchase?” While most people would see through her glossy white smile of straight teeth, shimmering lipstick and big bright eyes that absolutely never blinked during transaction, some people, mostly lonely single men, would pause for that one single instant before they could say no, and with that they had already fallen into the trap that was Raekay’s relentless Banana Card sales pitch.
“You’ll also receive 10% off at Banana Republic, Gap and Old Navy again after purchase, as well as another 15% off in the mail when you receive your card. You can also use your card online at BananaRepublic.com and receive 15% off, as well as free shipping on orders over $50...”
“Umm, I’m not sure that...”
“…Plus,” smile, and daddy’s girl voice in the fullest swing yet. No blinks. “…For every $200 you spend in store, you’ll receive $10 back in the mail as well as various coupons for special offers in store. On the month of your birthday we’ll give you $15 off your purchase, and if you spend $800 dollars in a calendar year, you’ll become a member of our Lux Membership…” here we go, the Lux card … “…and with that you’ll receive free shipping from online, free alterations on all your Banana Republic clothing, and $25 back on every $500 dollars you spend in our store!”
“Well…”
Her smile was in full detail and finally, without any energy or dignity left to try and blink if she wanted to, she’d close it with “so let’s get you started on that today!” And in her hand would appear a pen and an application shimmering in bright yellow, covered in coupons and fine print. That customer, 99% of the time, would crumble in her hands and open up a line of credit, putting themselves into the debt of Banana Republic. Raekay, after taxes, would make just about one dollar. But more disturbing were those times, about 1% of them, when the customer would still say no. Sometimes the intensity of Raekay’s performance stopped the transaction altogether. The sentences flowing from deep in her throat, brain and soul could turn the air sour. I once watched silently as a lady merely walked from the counter. Suddenly, at least for this customer, the idea of buying clothes just didn’t seem enjoyable anymore. The pain in Raekay’s voice was audible, but for some reason she just kept throwing the sales pitch at the retreating customer.
While political discussions were essentially forbidden in Banana Republic, Friday’s weekly Iraq protest in Portland’s Pioneer Square always seemed to bring a voice or two to the discussion table. One Friday I’d offended Jane by saying that I thought conservatives were just angry people who had bad sex (For the record folks, that statement is a proven fact). She told me that I was being inappropriate. I asked if she was conservative. “Yes, I’m a conservative,” Jane proclaimed in the most candid discussion we ever had. “People destroy people, it’s true. But mostly people destroy themselves. I refuse to live in a world where I must pay for other people’s mistakes. Yes, there are tremendous problems in the world, but it’s not my fault.” I didn’t respond. At the time I had nothing to say, but I knew that nothing I could say really had any place in the walls of “the Banana Republic.”
Had I really thought hard I would have asked in response, “What replaces the cynicism of the conservative?” The problem remains that even when we discount all the misfortune of the world as self-induced hardship, where is the solution? When everyone deserves to suffer for the crime of remaining uninspired in a world where virtuous success stories are outnumbered, there is no solution. The only solution discounts the entire argument to begin with. If we could possibly admit that people’s unsuccessful attempts at life are a product of something our society could fix, or maybe just improve, then it seems the whole idea of finding relentless success to the relentless employee is merely a shackle. In this worldview every failed citizen’s hopelessness is not justified, it’s validated. For Jane, this was not just the point of her job; it was the purpose of her life. She was seeking relentless success. Ever more disturbing was that she was trying to find it at Banana Republic.
I don’t know what exactly it was that inspired me to fall to the ground one summer afternoon, but I did. The sun was glaring through the massive, windowed walls, yet none of the heat could reach my skin. The perfectly conditioned and entirely vapid room was absorbing any notion of sun, turning invigorating rays of light into stagnant pools of cool; faux shade at its worst. I could do nothing but stand all day behind the cash registers processing one customer after another, each one with a desired dollar amount statistically traced from their entrance into the store. They could feel the heat no more than I, but I kept warming with each passing moment. I was standing aimlessly behind the register, pretending with ease to be doing something while finding that doing nothing produced no more or less result. The sun was beating down on me from behind the glass, begging for something more authentic than a perfect temperature.
I couldn’t get Jane’s words of wisdom out of my head. Sitting in the break area, a dense corner filled with retired display furniture and pamphlets on Banana personal success called “behind the seams,” I couldn’t help but overhear Jane’s smile explain that the success of Banana Republic lay in our ability to be 100% all the time.
“If we were doing one hundred percent at all moments, our goals would be attainable. It’s always an act of being so many different people in one day. You have to read your customer cues and relate to them at all times. By listening, you can become the person that they themselves will relate to.”
“You know, I’ve never really thought of it that way!” chimed Dick, enough flavor and honesty in his voice to make the peach crepe I was consuming taste like unsanitary asshole. I was still confused by the philosophy of Jane’s argument. All my time at Banana I was told to be myself. That I was hired because of who I was, not because of my ability to self adjust to please the perceptions of others.
“I find myself exhausted when I leave work,” I said, not realizing I was even speaking out loud. “I find myself losing track of myself with all these personalities. It takes so much of my energy switching between people, and at the end of the day I just forget who I was when I walked in the door that morning.” I could feel my words vibrate deep in my throat, slipping out in some desperate attempt for compassion. I couldn’t help but traverse the large stencil painting of a palm tree plastered of the break corner’s wall. There were thin branches climbing up the tall wall, each one with a carefully placed palm leaf to provide a canopy against the opaque orange, a color that seemed to do little to brighten or darken the walls.
“I think for someone with an acting background like yourself, you would have an advantage. Think of this store like the theater. When the doors open, the curtain goes up. Our customers are the audience and we help them through the show. You don’t see the stagehands. We don’t keep building the set after the curtain goes up. When you think of it that way, you can see how giving one hundred percent is attainable.”
My focus was still plastered to the ironic palm tree. One branch in particular crept off to the left in the most peculiar fashion, lower than the rest and almost perpendicular. The large leafy end landed in a corner, the stenciled palm shared by two walls of different direction. As she spoke, I could feel that my emotions had slipped away from Jane’s increasingly opaque smile. They were clinging like the obscure palm leaf to two walls in the hopes of finding an impossible third dimension.
I stood at the cash registers, never having realized that sunlight could be so two dimensional in the conditioned rays. My brain had lost all dimension of reality, asking every customer a script of questions that seemed so short of my own reality that I eventually became more a liar than an actor. What had we become? Between the customers and the company, I was the pawn; the one who got to sugarcoat the sun with a smile and make it all seem real in the eyes of the venturing skeptic.
So I fell. I stood staring at my register, no longer willing or able to move. I wouldn’t do it, and with no immediate way out in sight I took the fall with the full hope and intention that it would hurt me. I leaned slowly to my back right and let gravity pull me as far away from the stage as possible. The iconic glare of the bright register screen etched into my retinas, I slipped into the air, falling backwards by neither choice nor force. Rather I had given up. I had decided that I wouldn’t do this today, and probably not tomorrow. Maybe the day after by sheer lack of reasonable choice, but for now I was done, flying backwards through the air until my head and body landed firmly on the wood floor with a blunt force hard enough to stop the show.
The post-circus head sway continues. It only takes a single day to experience the monotonous lifestyle of Corporate America. A year to push some like myself over the edge. It never changes. You aren’t rewarded for innovation of thought unless it’s profitable, maybe if it’s inspirational since inspiration can be turned into profit. The only art in Corporate America is the theater it creates. Standing aimlessly on a sales floor, associates tap their feet or chew their nails when the show takes a break. They bob their heads from left to right, like circus elephants. Sometimes they just pull at their chains.
Corporate America thinks it has found the golden key to success. Smiles are dotted on friendly faces and colorful political correctness fills every exchange. In this world we’ve created a diversity that’s merely a form of translation. We may all say things differently but we’re all reading the same script. The conservatism is born in our ability to hold ourselves back in fear of making the wrong decision. We don’t want to say or do the wrong thing. We just don’t want to offend anybody. We look at 100% and see it as attainable purity in any given moment.
In reality we can only make the decisions that we do, and the world doesn’t punish us for making the right or the wrong ones. Only we can do that. Life can’t be censored or silenced. People can’t transcend their own humanity, denying their instincts in search of some idealistic propriety. Furthermore, what does our society have to say for itself when this bullshit infects something as seemingly simple as buying some chinos and argyle? If we could stop second guessing life as it walks toward us then maybe we could break the shackles at our feet, quit this silly performance, stop the private torture, and free ourselves from this captivity.
Wednesday, March 26, 2008
Too Much To Swallow
I find it exceedingly difficult to view life with the iron fist of restraint. We absolutely live in a world of money and capitol, where possession is defined by our value. What remains entirely confounding through this process of monetary exchange is just how little value a life can retain when it’s lost to the bullet holes of life’s unexpected rampage. It’s in this world of endless finances that I ask the question plaguing my generation: Have we lost sight of true possession?
My mom always told me that it was best to save. Life has a tendency to come flying at you like a speeding bullet, so relentless and quick that you can’t see it coming. I guess that’s unless some asshole corners you with a gun to your head. In that case you may acknowledge that split second when they pull the trigger, then WHAPAM, your fucking face blows to bits and pieces. That’s if you're lucky, I guess. Life’s not usually so direct. Rather, some even bigger asshole shoots the gun and misses the point completely, merely wounding you in the process in some vain attempt to play God. The unqualified idiots of the world, every one of us, can only hit or miss our targets. Which is why it’s always best to save. You know, for those unexpected moments when life fails to take you out completely.
My first piggy bank was your stereotypical pink ceramic pig complete with a slot in the back. I can’t quite remember what his name was, but he undoubtedly had one. Almost everything I owned had a name and I can guess his was probably something obnoxious like Oprah Oinks or Bacon Belly, that being my style. Dad set the piggy bank on my windowsill and stuffed a crisp dollar bill down the slot in Pinky Pig’s back. Being my tremendously impatient self, I was scouring the house for lost change. All I could find were pointless Nickels and Pennies, scrap metal that had already lost its glamour in my mid-nineties infantry. Having no income, the piggy bank was beginning to feel slightly obsolete in the broad scheme of things. So I popped Princess Pork’s plastic plug and found not one, but two crisply folded one-dollar bills.
Keen as I was, I had discovered the key to long term Piggy Bank investment; If you leave one dollar bill in the Pig then it turns into two, and fuck all those silly pennies (but leave a few for their customary jingle-jangle). Five years old and I’d already learned to diversify my portfolio.
My piggy bank continued to fund my daily trips to the seven-eleven where I spent much of my time in serious debate over candy selection. I thought myself a candy connoisseur of sorts - tried them all. I’d scour the lollipops for the wrapper with an Indian shooting the star with his bow. That always meant a free lollipop the next time around, which meant a second piece of candy, and I’d still always have my dollar. I grew addicted to the doughnuts for a short time. A complete glutton to sweets and coming off a particularly good Piggy day (Curly Chops left me three bucks that day!), I bought the largest doughnut they had. Glazed cinnamon swirls with sweet molasses paste, deep fried to the point where every bite was as wet and crunchy as a mouth full of French fries. It was heaven and I ate it all at once. “Don’t you want to save some of that for later?” Mom inquired, seemingly concerned. “You know, my mother always told me not to eat anything bigger than your head. If it were bigger then your head she’d say, ‘don’t eat that, it’s bigger than your head.’” “Mom, that doesn’t make any sense.”
Does though. Never eat anything bigger than your head. Mid-shit and entirely unprepared, my stomach gave in to the colossal doughnut. The room was ablaze with the most awful mix of sticky sweet meets sickly sour, the floor carpeted with bile and molasses paste. I screamed Bloody Mary, “Mom! Dad! Anybody!” Five years old and my first OD - ass on the toilet, face in the sink (after my move to New York, I’ve yet to top this moment). For a long while after that night even the slightest smell of doughnuts made my stomach numb with unease.
Dad wasn’t too happy to find Bountiful Boar without any real bounty at all, save a buck of course, and a half-handful of pennies for that novelty clickity-clank. We’d even bothered to smash the damn thing with a hammer, I guess unaware that my toddler fingers could easily sweep the pig clean. Shit out of sow, that’s what I was. I guess I’d known the whole time that the money was meant for some grand culmination, but it seemed rather pointless to sit and wait for some need or reward to stew, isolated, in such an ugly display of ceramic.
My only other self-guarded bank was a taunting three-foot Crayon. I figured in a perfect world that some young kid would fill the crayon with dollars and change, then twist it open at the middle letting all the pennies and quarters and dollars spill out onto the floor. My crayon merely became a solid weapon of choice when fighting with my sister; blunt and rigid with no excessive pain in its hollowed punch. No pouring sea of financial independence. I had nothing to wait for.
- - - -
In a city like New York, it’s hard not to recognize the necessary role of money in everyday life. Money is survival, and surviving comfortably is ideal. Aristotle would have a field day in New York’s new millennium of constant excess and deficiency; one man eating rice out of a puddle with a spoon while another tosses a cigarette from his government issued Escalade. Yet I can’t help but wonder if Aristotle just got it all wrong while getting it all right. Despite his and Karl Marx’s fetish with the inevitability of the rise of the masses in the mean, isn’t human existence in itself already testing the limits of nature by seeking the excess? Survival? Since we no longer have spears and loin clothes, the latter a disappointment, we now have dollars and bling. We’ve got to divide somehow, and since it’s no longer socially acceptable to kill someone unless you can do it without getting caught, we may as well develop a new method for valuing one another. Ta-dah! Money is born.
Mind you, I’m not a complete pessimist in this worldview. It is entirely possible to live within the means and seek the happiness that neither monetary victory nor defeat seems to bring in this market economy. It’s not, however, in the slightest possible to remove oneself from the society we’ve created, one that is powered by the excessive elite as the world careens out of control to preserve the human existence. Are we looking for too much while saving every little piece of nothing? What happens when the world just fills to the brim and we have no other place to go?
Maybe we’ll make like empire penguins and huddle together, shoulder to shoulder, regurgitating our waste from one another as we slowly waddle through the masses to keep warm. But even in a society of penguins, everyone gets their turn to rest in the warmth and comfort of the middle. Do we each get a turn?
The universe may have no horizon. The ultimate goal of organic life could possibly be to utilize the tools of endless expansion to master survival. It still seems rather unlikely, within this newfound optimism, to expect endless expansion can continue without endless consumption. We’re consuming at the sacrifice of something far more complicated. If the world can fall apart at the hands of man, can’t the galaxy? The universe? How far can we run from ourselves?
I had a frightening dream the other morning where mother earth had grown arms and legs and, wearing plastic medical gloves, proceeded to shove my three-foot childhood crayon piggy bank up my ass. She told me to “save up.” I woke in a sweat, and realized I was only sleeping on top of a beer bottle. Classy, but what did it all mean? Was the whole globe telling us to take our sordid aspirations and shove ‘em?
It’s always interesting to me how willing people are to foster the preservation of some self-proclaimed purity while remaining ignorant to our constant consumption of the natural world. “Man should sit with man, woman with woman,” proclaims the homeless man in the corner of the subway car. Wearing a Santa hat and sporting an upturned broom with a plastic bag on top, he was a messiah with a scepter. “That way there’s no confusion. Nobody can see me sitting with a young girl. You’ll get arrested if you’re dating girls. Love your husband, wives. Wives should love their husbands, husbands their wives. Boyfriends love your girlfriends, girlfriends your boyfriends.” He fell asleep in his wheel chair and began to piss himself. The grade on the Manhattan Bridge proceeded, allowing for an exciting rush hour game of who can avoid the flowing river of piss. Thank you MTA for locking our only escape between cars. And thank you homeless messiah, you have preserved the dignity we’ve all so desperately needed.
What are we saving up for? Likewise, why are more and more of us slipping into life’s debt? Whether it’s a feeling of utter futility or a sense that life is just a prolonged march toward the inevitable, some of us are taking life’s gun and shoving it down our throats. Many still remain unsatisfied with the closure at hand, so a vain attempt to find solid conclusion follows. We just can’t quite force ourselves to pull the trigger. Not yet at least. We want life to take us when we’re ready to take ourselves. Every crowded street in Manhattan is dotted with people charging from point A to point B, their hand on a gun and a gun in their mouth. They are the wealthy, the poor and the rest of us, all just waiting with guns to fire at whatever target seems implicitly provocative.
Life in the means ain’t all that bad, folks. No, Humans may never find that ideal balance. Our lives have quite obviously become a product of the sordid associations of a species that wants to have its cake and eat it too. But it’s too much cake! We’ve got to share before we lose it mid-shit, wishing we’d never had a piece of it all to begin with. Is any of this possible? The optimist in the means can’t rationally answer that question, especially if he is in question as to why we exist the way we do in the first place. But what remains increasingly apparent is that we humans are trying to eat something much bigger than our heads.
My mom always told me that it was best to save. Life has a tendency to come flying at you like a speeding bullet, so relentless and quick that you can’t see it coming. I guess that’s unless some asshole corners you with a gun to your head. In that case you may acknowledge that split second when they pull the trigger, then WHAPAM, your fucking face blows to bits and pieces. That’s if you're lucky, I guess. Life’s not usually so direct. Rather, some even bigger asshole shoots the gun and misses the point completely, merely wounding you in the process in some vain attempt to play God. The unqualified idiots of the world, every one of us, can only hit or miss our targets. Which is why it’s always best to save. You know, for those unexpected moments when life fails to take you out completely.
My first piggy bank was your stereotypical pink ceramic pig complete with a slot in the back. I can’t quite remember what his name was, but he undoubtedly had one. Almost everything I owned had a name and I can guess his was probably something obnoxious like Oprah Oinks or Bacon Belly, that being my style. Dad set the piggy bank on my windowsill and stuffed a crisp dollar bill down the slot in Pinky Pig’s back. Being my tremendously impatient self, I was scouring the house for lost change. All I could find were pointless Nickels and Pennies, scrap metal that had already lost its glamour in my mid-nineties infantry. Having no income, the piggy bank was beginning to feel slightly obsolete in the broad scheme of things. So I popped Princess Pork’s plastic plug and found not one, but two crisply folded one-dollar bills.
Keen as I was, I had discovered the key to long term Piggy Bank investment; If you leave one dollar bill in the Pig then it turns into two, and fuck all those silly pennies (but leave a few for their customary jingle-jangle). Five years old and I’d already learned to diversify my portfolio.
My piggy bank continued to fund my daily trips to the seven-eleven where I spent much of my time in serious debate over candy selection. I thought myself a candy connoisseur of sorts - tried them all. I’d scour the lollipops for the wrapper with an Indian shooting the star with his bow. That always meant a free lollipop the next time around, which meant a second piece of candy, and I’d still always have my dollar. I grew addicted to the doughnuts for a short time. A complete glutton to sweets and coming off a particularly good Piggy day (Curly Chops left me three bucks that day!), I bought the largest doughnut they had. Glazed cinnamon swirls with sweet molasses paste, deep fried to the point where every bite was as wet and crunchy as a mouth full of French fries. It was heaven and I ate it all at once. “Don’t you want to save some of that for later?” Mom inquired, seemingly concerned. “You know, my mother always told me not to eat anything bigger than your head. If it were bigger then your head she’d say, ‘don’t eat that, it’s bigger than your head.’” “Mom, that doesn’t make any sense.”
Does though. Never eat anything bigger than your head. Mid-shit and entirely unprepared, my stomach gave in to the colossal doughnut. The room was ablaze with the most awful mix of sticky sweet meets sickly sour, the floor carpeted with bile and molasses paste. I screamed Bloody Mary, “Mom! Dad! Anybody!” Five years old and my first OD - ass on the toilet, face in the sink (after my move to New York, I’ve yet to top this moment). For a long while after that night even the slightest smell of doughnuts made my stomach numb with unease.
Dad wasn’t too happy to find Bountiful Boar without any real bounty at all, save a buck of course, and a half-handful of pennies for that novelty clickity-clank. We’d even bothered to smash the damn thing with a hammer, I guess unaware that my toddler fingers could easily sweep the pig clean. Shit out of sow, that’s what I was. I guess I’d known the whole time that the money was meant for some grand culmination, but it seemed rather pointless to sit and wait for some need or reward to stew, isolated, in such an ugly display of ceramic.
My only other self-guarded bank was a taunting three-foot Crayon. I figured in a perfect world that some young kid would fill the crayon with dollars and change, then twist it open at the middle letting all the pennies and quarters and dollars spill out onto the floor. My crayon merely became a solid weapon of choice when fighting with my sister; blunt and rigid with no excessive pain in its hollowed punch. No pouring sea of financial independence. I had nothing to wait for.
- - - -
In a city like New York, it’s hard not to recognize the necessary role of money in everyday life. Money is survival, and surviving comfortably is ideal. Aristotle would have a field day in New York’s new millennium of constant excess and deficiency; one man eating rice out of a puddle with a spoon while another tosses a cigarette from his government issued Escalade. Yet I can’t help but wonder if Aristotle just got it all wrong while getting it all right. Despite his and Karl Marx’s fetish with the inevitability of the rise of the masses in the mean, isn’t human existence in itself already testing the limits of nature by seeking the excess? Survival? Since we no longer have spears and loin clothes, the latter a disappointment, we now have dollars and bling. We’ve got to divide somehow, and since it’s no longer socially acceptable to kill someone unless you can do it without getting caught, we may as well develop a new method for valuing one another. Ta-dah! Money is born.
Mind you, I’m not a complete pessimist in this worldview. It is entirely possible to live within the means and seek the happiness that neither monetary victory nor defeat seems to bring in this market economy. It’s not, however, in the slightest possible to remove oneself from the society we’ve created, one that is powered by the excessive elite as the world careens out of control to preserve the human existence. Are we looking for too much while saving every little piece of nothing? What happens when the world just fills to the brim and we have no other place to go?
Maybe we’ll make like empire penguins and huddle together, shoulder to shoulder, regurgitating our waste from one another as we slowly waddle through the masses to keep warm. But even in a society of penguins, everyone gets their turn to rest in the warmth and comfort of the middle. Do we each get a turn?
The universe may have no horizon. The ultimate goal of organic life could possibly be to utilize the tools of endless expansion to master survival. It still seems rather unlikely, within this newfound optimism, to expect endless expansion can continue without endless consumption. We’re consuming at the sacrifice of something far more complicated. If the world can fall apart at the hands of man, can’t the galaxy? The universe? How far can we run from ourselves?
I had a frightening dream the other morning where mother earth had grown arms and legs and, wearing plastic medical gloves, proceeded to shove my three-foot childhood crayon piggy bank up my ass. She told me to “save up.” I woke in a sweat, and realized I was only sleeping on top of a beer bottle. Classy, but what did it all mean? Was the whole globe telling us to take our sordid aspirations and shove ‘em?
It’s always interesting to me how willing people are to foster the preservation of some self-proclaimed purity while remaining ignorant to our constant consumption of the natural world. “Man should sit with man, woman with woman,” proclaims the homeless man in the corner of the subway car. Wearing a Santa hat and sporting an upturned broom with a plastic bag on top, he was a messiah with a scepter. “That way there’s no confusion. Nobody can see me sitting with a young girl. You’ll get arrested if you’re dating girls. Love your husband, wives. Wives should love their husbands, husbands their wives. Boyfriends love your girlfriends, girlfriends your boyfriends.” He fell asleep in his wheel chair and began to piss himself. The grade on the Manhattan Bridge proceeded, allowing for an exciting rush hour game of who can avoid the flowing river of piss. Thank you MTA for locking our only escape between cars. And thank you homeless messiah, you have preserved the dignity we’ve all so desperately needed.
What are we saving up for? Likewise, why are more and more of us slipping into life’s debt? Whether it’s a feeling of utter futility or a sense that life is just a prolonged march toward the inevitable, some of us are taking life’s gun and shoving it down our throats. Many still remain unsatisfied with the closure at hand, so a vain attempt to find solid conclusion follows. We just can’t quite force ourselves to pull the trigger. Not yet at least. We want life to take us when we’re ready to take ourselves. Every crowded street in Manhattan is dotted with people charging from point A to point B, their hand on a gun and a gun in their mouth. They are the wealthy, the poor and the rest of us, all just waiting with guns to fire at whatever target seems implicitly provocative.
Life in the means ain’t all that bad, folks. No, Humans may never find that ideal balance. Our lives have quite obviously become a product of the sordid associations of a species that wants to have its cake and eat it too. But it’s too much cake! We’ve got to share before we lose it mid-shit, wishing we’d never had a piece of it all to begin with. Is any of this possible? The optimist in the means can’t rationally answer that question, especially if he is in question as to why we exist the way we do in the first place. But what remains increasingly apparent is that we humans are trying to eat something much bigger than our heads.
Wednesday, March 19, 2008
Not A Good Soldier
I’ve met only one real genius in my life thus far. She was my high school drama teacher in Portland, Oregon. A post New York drama drill sergeant, Mama-Jay, as I’d like to call her, was not your average lesson. Our first class sophomore year was an exercise on communication. Us students, all thirty-six of us, were pushed into the florescent lighting of windowless Room 279 (a wonderful room for mid-rehearsal hookups, or so I’ve heard…). Broken into pairs, we were told to pick a song that we could hum with an appropriately unique melody. Jessica and I chose the star spangled banner, obviously.
“Get down on your hands and knees!” Mama-J screamed. Reluctantly we did. “Now I’m going to turn off the lights, and I want you all to crawl around and hum your song until you find your partner.” I bet Adam, “ten bucks this leads to a national scandal.” “Go!” Bam. The lights went out and the room slipped into pitch-dark anarchy. Thirty-six voices all fighting to push the loudest note in a tremendous hub of hum. Every chord and melody blended while we crawled aimlessly on the floor, guiding our bodies against one another in search for our song. There were some questionable hands grabbing in the dark, but I was too busy feeling lost and helpless in the pile of bodies to think of anything more than humming those stars and bars.
It wasn’t easy to leave that class for my fourth period IB writing seminar. Our syllabus, titled “How to Succeed in International Baccalaureate,” was void of a single inspiring sentence or thought. I guess those old ideas had become rather cavil. In the odd twist of educational irony, this chicanery was not always transparent. If anything it was taken with utmost seriousness. “You must do this or you’re going to fail!” That was the theme of life in my education.
“The IB rubric is not sympathetic,” railed Mr. Gordenstien. “You can slack off, but IB doesn’t care. You can be sick, and IB doesn’t care. You can be dead… IB doesn’t care.” Well what the fuck does IB care about? As we spent the afternoon sifting through the seven levels of the IB rubric, I began to realize that it was all the same shit with a slightly different smell. Instead of letters we would be assigned a number. “1” meant you obviously didn’t try. “2” meant you tried but you’re a fucking idiot. “3” meant you spent a lot of money just to scrape average, still not passing. “4” was a big congratulations, you passed but most schools still wont give you credit for it. “5” was a big “woo-hoo.” “6” and “7” were essentially deemed unattainable. “I’ve only had two students get a six, and I’d be shocked to get one out of this class.” At least we had moral support.
Our study of the “rational mind” was yet another headache of contradiction. Most of our classes were spent discussing philosophy and the roots of the educational structure. As a class we concluded that the rational mind would deem standardized education entirely irrational. “People are snow flakes,” professed Gordenstien, our awkward, Jewish poet. “Is there another Mr. Gordenstien out there? Is there another man as equal in personality as Mr. Gordenstien? I’m afraid there just isn’t.” While I shuttered at the very notion of a Gordenstien clone, I couldn’t help but sink deep into my chair and feel helplessly lost in the dense irrational.
The rational mind was saying, “fuck you.” At least mine did while walking into class for IB thesis presentations; hickies on my neck and cum in my hair. No room left on my transcript for disgrace, my teachers began stamping my forehead with labels. I was the slut, the rebel, or the contrary conformist. In the end, I was merely a nobody, lacking any vision or direction for my life. “What happened, Andy?” asked my advisor, the same woman who called a meeting with my mom and the principle to fight a “B” in my Sophomore English class. “He’s valedictorian material!” she protested then, whatever that was supposed to mean. Now I was just a blip of self-decay. The rebelling conformist slut. “Boyfriends are for the established! Sex is for the mature! Drugs are for the unhappy!” “No shit! Really?”
I guess my redemption came senior year when it wasn’t my water bottle filled with vodka second period, nor were any stories told on my wasted sexcapades in hot tubs – good old Amanda Little beating freshmen off with her feet. Nope, these stories were the sad tales of those who actually did give a shit. Ha! They were the all-star athletes mixed with the honor roll. They weren’t the valedictorians of the IB enclave, their lives too consumed with the art of defining themselves within the 1 through 7 rubric to be even slightly interesting. But everyone was just trying to “get it done.” It was almost over. “Andy! You can do this and you know it,” my freshman English teacher, three years after the fact. “This should be easy for you. You’re not some fuck-up…” Nope, I’m not. She must not have understood my own protest when I berated her my third week of high school for teaching us “canned curriculum.” And I still got an A!
No one seemed happy with the system. Some of my teachers had given up beyond their employment. My morbidly obese IB history teacher led his unit on America’s independence with a weeklong showing of Mel Gibson in “The Patriot.” We were then expected to write a heavily detailed five page formatted research paper with footnotes and textual references. What’s depressing is that the man really did know history - he could probably recite Lucretia Mott’s menstrual calendar to the date - but he didn’t give a shit about teaching, and he didn’t give a shit about my sluty, conformist ways. Our unit on slavery was a showing of “Amistad.” The last two months of class were a marathon of movies I’ve never seen having cut every class. The next year he was diagnosed with cancer and died within months. I’m convinced that high school killed him.
These were the people educating me. I wish I could fill the margins of my transcript with evaluations of every person who managed to fail me those four years. Maybe I could just write a cover letter? A plea to the rational mind, “These grades mean nothing! Science has proven otherwise! Everything we are taught or have discovered in our short human existence has contradicted these ideals!”
In drama we continued our lessons with an exercise on the placement of power. We were told to, in turns, take any piece of furniture and place it in a position of authority in the room. The first girl placed a chair on top of a desk in the center of our circle. Soon a second chair followed. Then a third. A fourth. The stack of chairs was growing to a precarious height. When it was my turn I placed a chair upside-down atop the rest, believing that if I could remove it from it’s assigned gravitational direction and place it higher then the others that it could be the all-defining force of unrestrained power. All right, that’s probably an elaboration of my own philosophical calculations. Either way, it was still a miscalculation. The chair wouldn’t rest and the stack began to slip. As the tower swayed from left to right the room erupted in screams as we all scattered from the toppling structure, miraculously avoiding a lawsuit. The non-conformist chair had no place at the top of the tower and it all came crashing down around me.
“We really fucked up,” Mama-J told me in private one night. We sat in the cold auditorium watching rehearsals for the spring musical. “My generation let this happen. We let the world erode around us. We sold out.” “Sold out? What did you sell out for?” “You see that’s the point. We sold out for safety and comfort. Every generation sells out at some point. You’ll see what I mean when you grow older, but at some point in life you just want stability and comfort. You couldn’t give half a shit about where you stood even if you tried. Fuck, the only reason I’m still here is because I’m fifty with a boyfriend who has a retarded son. I can’t leave that asshole!” “Is the sex good?” “It’s sex.” At the end of the show’s run I bought her a present and tied a little note to the box:
Now you have no reason to stay… love Andy
It was a vibrator, of course.
- - - -
Of all my educational traumas, nothing beats the sex box of fifth grade, my first real educational introduction to the not so innocuous. It was painted black with questions like “Sex?” “Love?” and “Penis?” sparkling with glitter glue. The side that said “Penis?” was of course turned to the wall. “We don’t want to confuse Principle Matthews.”
First note, ‘Penis’ is confusing.
The sex box remained enshrined at the front of the classroom so we could discretely insert anonymous inquiries to be answered at the end of the week – what would become our first, and very last, Sex Friday.
“Ah, of course. ‘What is pubic hair?’ Well class, once you start to hit puberty you’ll start to notice some changes. One of those changes is hair. You’ll start growing hair on your genitals.” “When is that?” “When you reach puberty.” “No, when does puberty happen.”
“Well it’s not the same for everyone. Some of you have probably already started puberty.” We all gazed around, scanning the room for possible suspects. “Anyway, that’s what pubic hair is.” “But why does it grow there?” “What do you mean?” “Why do we need hair down there?”
“Well. It’s… Think of it like a pillow. Pubic hair grows to cushion your genitals. They’re very sensitive, especially after puberty. So… think of it as nature’s pillow.”
Second note, pubic hair is pillow for ‘Penis.’
A half hour later, “Alright last question. ‘What is sex?’ Oh, well that’s easy. When a man and woman have sex, it’s an act of pleasure. They can love each other - though a lot of people these days don’t - and they have sex to pleasure one another.” “What pleasure?” “It’s a stimulation. You wouldn’t understand yet because you haven’t reached puberty.” Eyes locked on the non-puberty boy. “Not you, I mean in general, you have to finish puberty before you can feel that… stimulation. A man will insert his penis into the vagina and the penis will stimulate the vagina… It penetrates the vagina, causing pleasurable stimulation. Think of the penis like a cookie. A cookie tastes good to the mouth, a penis tastes good to the vagina.”
Third note, ‘Penis’ tastes good.
- - - -
Back in sophomore year, I was still crawling through the dark room singing those stars and bars. As our thirty-six voices droned on, Mama-J left the room to make a phone call. So there we were, all of us determined to find a solution to the task before us when in my ear I heard Jessica’s whisper, “Andy?” “Hey! Jessica?” “Cool, there’s like two other groups with this song.” “Oh, well you found me.” “Yeah… what now?” “Is that your hand?” a third voice, male, “Oh… sorry.” Jessica again, “Hey, let’s go this way.” “Ow! Shit!” “What?” “I hit my head on a desk.”
We finally found a corner to sit and talk. Mama-J never came back but no one dared to turn on the lights. At least one couple was going at something, but for the most part we all just tried to enjoy the peace and solitude that our school day usually didn’t provide. Having not been taught how to self-maintain once abandoned by our guiding instructors, all sorts of rowdy shenanigans replaced the task we’d begun. While this was not particularly unusual for my drama class, it was on this day that our teacher’s lesson actually began to resonate.
We’re all lost in the dark. It’s like someone turned out the lights and said, “Everyone! Yell as loud as you can so that somebody might hear you!” The sad part is that no matter how loud we hum our song, we still have no idea where we are or where we’re going. No one wants to admit this anarchy, at least not at school. Rather we’re all placed on a scale of 1 through 7 to determine just how well we can conform to an arbitrary system of mental ejaculation. We’re given a list of songs to sing while crawling through the dark. These are the songs that the educational elite will listen to.
American education continues to foster these failed ideals on knowledge. The institutions meant to propel us beyond these obviously broken systems are so caught up in money that they refuse to denounce the paperwork and statistics of the high school oxymoron. When are we going to wake up? The students who don’t fit the broken mold are some of the most independent idealists themselves. All my life I’ve been taught that to break the mold is the most important step to human individuality, or was this just a lie they tell us in school? Our society can’t self-proclaim a strong embrace of the arts while disqualifying the argument on the art of “how-to-learn.” It’s not rocket science. In fact it’s rational thinking, a term hijacked by the educational elite in their writings and studies. The rational mind is the new aristocracy as we enter a generation in desperate need of leadership and direction. We need yet another person to tell us what to do.
Well I’m not enlisting in the alphabet army, no matter how homoerotic my uniformed fantasies may be. This is war, folks. Those with the money are herding us like cattle, weeding us out of the dark and into their pockets in exchange for the “American Dream.”
So what happened to our schools? Is it the tradition itself of sitting in uncomfortable chairs within the awful color choice of muted green meets musky orange that we are so desperate to preserve? What values are we trying to achieve by herding our children through benchmarks and GPA’s? The lady on the corner of 56th and Lex makes a convincing argument, “They stop teaching prayer in school and now we’ve got autism.”
So many of my educators loved to rail on about the system. “They have us in a death grip,” my English teacher told me. “We have criteria that must be met, and the schools have a fixation on standardized tests.” Really? No shit! You don’t say so!?! Who’da’thunk that somebody somewhere was pushing benchmarks to guide our uninspired educators? Generations of sellouts have passed this deficit of integrity on to the youth of America so that idiots teach idiots and nobody learns a thing! I don’t think I’ve ever heard of a teacher getting fired for expanding on required projects. No teacher I know of has ever been dismissed for engaging and inspiring students through creative means (despite my better judgment, sexual means are not creative). Never has the temporary replacement of structure with freeform art been a mortal sin. We had two weeks to make party masks when reading Romeo & Juliet - graded of course - but no time to throw out these ever-looming deadlines.
Only sixty-nine percent of high school students manage to graduate. In the thirty-five largest U.S. cities, less than fifty percent of students starting their freshman year will see a high school diploma. How much longer can we blame students for the failures of those meant to guide us? It’s all about the degree. Those who pushed through while filling in dots with their number two pencil, content for whatever reason, suddenly have a world of opportunity before them (or so we are meant to believe). But what is the purpose of this world? Is it to make money? That’s the big winner?
What the fuck am I supposed to do with money? I guess spend it seems like the rational answer to that question. Give it to charity the more noble. But who am I in all this mess? I’m merely the man who takes a pile of nothing and hands it out across the world until it turns into something; a product so far beyond my own human capacities that I somehow think myself the messiah. The God. Whether this great pile of money represents selfishness or benevolence, it’s still the selfish result of a culture sold on selling out.
In the end, the great ideal is to be something because right now you’re absolutely nothing. An ad on the uptown D train says it all:
- “My train! Ahh, Phew. Made it. Can’t believe how crowded it is. Look at her… What a power suit… she must be on her way to a big meeting or an interview or something… I wish I had a reason to wear my power suit…” Adelphi University can take you there! -
I don’t think I remember “power suit” from sixth grade career day, but I guess it’s now an accredited degree. I bet that power suit is on her way to Adelphi University to beat off with her tenure and make a buck or two. Or maybe, grammatical errors included, the power suit is just a metaphor for the biggest problem of all. It’s something you buy. Your degree actually is your power suit! There’s an idea. How many years until it’s printed on Louis Vuitton paper?
What happened to dreams, man? Life may be about pushing yourself to the top, but shouldn’t that plateau be something personal? It should be something that makes your heart flutter whenever you think of it. It should take you to every place you every wanted to go, however few or many. These destinations should be filled with honest satisfaction, not material or accredited benchmarks. Life doesn’t sit and wait and say, “Here boy! This way… over here!”
To be honest, life is a cunt and she doesn’t give a shit if you got a perfect score on your SAT’s. She may choose to just fuck you over the very next day. So where are you left? Were you happy all those days you spent in your SAT prep class? Your PSAT prep class? How about your AP or IB exams? Have you proven yourself? What’s your grade? Your number? Feel enlightened yet?
Not a bit and I’m pissed. They always promised it would lead to bigger, greater things. They preached that when you finally turned the corner on high school that life would be in plain sight. What a sick misconception! I hope that youth today are dropping out not because they don’t want to learn but because they’re just not learning at all. They’re missing out on life and struggle in exchange for material bullshit. The room is still pitch-black, baby. Nobody’s ever going to turn the light on. So I say sing something good (preferably not the stars and bars) and hope that somebody somewhere is listening. And don’t shave your pillow, please… it’s sensitive down there.
“Get down on your hands and knees!” Mama-J screamed. Reluctantly we did. “Now I’m going to turn off the lights, and I want you all to crawl around and hum your song until you find your partner.” I bet Adam, “ten bucks this leads to a national scandal.” “Go!” Bam. The lights went out and the room slipped into pitch-dark anarchy. Thirty-six voices all fighting to push the loudest note in a tremendous hub of hum. Every chord and melody blended while we crawled aimlessly on the floor, guiding our bodies against one another in search for our song. There were some questionable hands grabbing in the dark, but I was too busy feeling lost and helpless in the pile of bodies to think of anything more than humming those stars and bars.
It wasn’t easy to leave that class for my fourth period IB writing seminar. Our syllabus, titled “How to Succeed in International Baccalaureate,” was void of a single inspiring sentence or thought. I guess those old ideas had become rather cavil. In the odd twist of educational irony, this chicanery was not always transparent. If anything it was taken with utmost seriousness. “You must do this or you’re going to fail!” That was the theme of life in my education.
“The IB rubric is not sympathetic,” railed Mr. Gordenstien. “You can slack off, but IB doesn’t care. You can be sick, and IB doesn’t care. You can be dead… IB doesn’t care.” Well what the fuck does IB care about? As we spent the afternoon sifting through the seven levels of the IB rubric, I began to realize that it was all the same shit with a slightly different smell. Instead of letters we would be assigned a number. “1” meant you obviously didn’t try. “2” meant you tried but you’re a fucking idiot. “3” meant you spent a lot of money just to scrape average, still not passing. “4” was a big congratulations, you passed but most schools still wont give you credit for it. “5” was a big “woo-hoo.” “6” and “7” were essentially deemed unattainable. “I’ve only had two students get a six, and I’d be shocked to get one out of this class.” At least we had moral support.
Our study of the “rational mind” was yet another headache of contradiction. Most of our classes were spent discussing philosophy and the roots of the educational structure. As a class we concluded that the rational mind would deem standardized education entirely irrational. “People are snow flakes,” professed Gordenstien, our awkward, Jewish poet. “Is there another Mr. Gordenstien out there? Is there another man as equal in personality as Mr. Gordenstien? I’m afraid there just isn’t.” While I shuttered at the very notion of a Gordenstien clone, I couldn’t help but sink deep into my chair and feel helplessly lost in the dense irrational.
The rational mind was saying, “fuck you.” At least mine did while walking into class for IB thesis presentations; hickies on my neck and cum in my hair. No room left on my transcript for disgrace, my teachers began stamping my forehead with labels. I was the slut, the rebel, or the contrary conformist. In the end, I was merely a nobody, lacking any vision or direction for my life. “What happened, Andy?” asked my advisor, the same woman who called a meeting with my mom and the principle to fight a “B” in my Sophomore English class. “He’s valedictorian material!” she protested then, whatever that was supposed to mean. Now I was just a blip of self-decay. The rebelling conformist slut. “Boyfriends are for the established! Sex is for the mature! Drugs are for the unhappy!” “No shit! Really?”
I guess my redemption came senior year when it wasn’t my water bottle filled with vodka second period, nor were any stories told on my wasted sexcapades in hot tubs – good old Amanda Little beating freshmen off with her feet. Nope, these stories were the sad tales of those who actually did give a shit. Ha! They were the all-star athletes mixed with the honor roll. They weren’t the valedictorians of the IB enclave, their lives too consumed with the art of defining themselves within the 1 through 7 rubric to be even slightly interesting. But everyone was just trying to “get it done.” It was almost over. “Andy! You can do this and you know it,” my freshman English teacher, three years after the fact. “This should be easy for you. You’re not some fuck-up…” Nope, I’m not. She must not have understood my own protest when I berated her my third week of high school for teaching us “canned curriculum.” And I still got an A!
No one seemed happy with the system. Some of my teachers had given up beyond their employment. My morbidly obese IB history teacher led his unit on America’s independence with a weeklong showing of Mel Gibson in “The Patriot.” We were then expected to write a heavily detailed five page formatted research paper with footnotes and textual references. What’s depressing is that the man really did know history - he could probably recite Lucretia Mott’s menstrual calendar to the date - but he didn’t give a shit about teaching, and he didn’t give a shit about my sluty, conformist ways. Our unit on slavery was a showing of “Amistad.” The last two months of class were a marathon of movies I’ve never seen having cut every class. The next year he was diagnosed with cancer and died within months. I’m convinced that high school killed him.
These were the people educating me. I wish I could fill the margins of my transcript with evaluations of every person who managed to fail me those four years. Maybe I could just write a cover letter? A plea to the rational mind, “These grades mean nothing! Science has proven otherwise! Everything we are taught or have discovered in our short human existence has contradicted these ideals!”
In drama we continued our lessons with an exercise on the placement of power. We were told to, in turns, take any piece of furniture and place it in a position of authority in the room. The first girl placed a chair on top of a desk in the center of our circle. Soon a second chair followed. Then a third. A fourth. The stack of chairs was growing to a precarious height. When it was my turn I placed a chair upside-down atop the rest, believing that if I could remove it from it’s assigned gravitational direction and place it higher then the others that it could be the all-defining force of unrestrained power. All right, that’s probably an elaboration of my own philosophical calculations. Either way, it was still a miscalculation. The chair wouldn’t rest and the stack began to slip. As the tower swayed from left to right the room erupted in screams as we all scattered from the toppling structure, miraculously avoiding a lawsuit. The non-conformist chair had no place at the top of the tower and it all came crashing down around me.
“We really fucked up,” Mama-J told me in private one night. We sat in the cold auditorium watching rehearsals for the spring musical. “My generation let this happen. We let the world erode around us. We sold out.” “Sold out? What did you sell out for?” “You see that’s the point. We sold out for safety and comfort. Every generation sells out at some point. You’ll see what I mean when you grow older, but at some point in life you just want stability and comfort. You couldn’t give half a shit about where you stood even if you tried. Fuck, the only reason I’m still here is because I’m fifty with a boyfriend who has a retarded son. I can’t leave that asshole!” “Is the sex good?” “It’s sex.” At the end of the show’s run I bought her a present and tied a little note to the box:
Now you have no reason to stay… love Andy
It was a vibrator, of course.
- - - -
Of all my educational traumas, nothing beats the sex box of fifth grade, my first real educational introduction to the not so innocuous. It was painted black with questions like “Sex?” “Love?” and “Penis?” sparkling with glitter glue. The side that said “Penis?” was of course turned to the wall. “We don’t want to confuse Principle Matthews.”
First note, ‘Penis’ is confusing.
The sex box remained enshrined at the front of the classroom so we could discretely insert anonymous inquiries to be answered at the end of the week – what would become our first, and very last, Sex Friday.
“Ah, of course. ‘What is pubic hair?’ Well class, once you start to hit puberty you’ll start to notice some changes. One of those changes is hair. You’ll start growing hair on your genitals.” “When is that?” “When you reach puberty.” “No, when does puberty happen.”
“Well it’s not the same for everyone. Some of you have probably already started puberty.” We all gazed around, scanning the room for possible suspects. “Anyway, that’s what pubic hair is.” “But why does it grow there?” “What do you mean?” “Why do we need hair down there?”
“Well. It’s… Think of it like a pillow. Pubic hair grows to cushion your genitals. They’re very sensitive, especially after puberty. So… think of it as nature’s pillow.”
Second note, pubic hair is pillow for ‘Penis.’
A half hour later, “Alright last question. ‘What is sex?’ Oh, well that’s easy. When a man and woman have sex, it’s an act of pleasure. They can love each other - though a lot of people these days don’t - and they have sex to pleasure one another.” “What pleasure?” “It’s a stimulation. You wouldn’t understand yet because you haven’t reached puberty.” Eyes locked on the non-puberty boy. “Not you, I mean in general, you have to finish puberty before you can feel that… stimulation. A man will insert his penis into the vagina and the penis will stimulate the vagina… It penetrates the vagina, causing pleasurable stimulation. Think of the penis like a cookie. A cookie tastes good to the mouth, a penis tastes good to the vagina.”
Third note, ‘Penis’ tastes good.
- - - -
Back in sophomore year, I was still crawling through the dark room singing those stars and bars. As our thirty-six voices droned on, Mama-J left the room to make a phone call. So there we were, all of us determined to find a solution to the task before us when in my ear I heard Jessica’s whisper, “Andy?” “Hey! Jessica?” “Cool, there’s like two other groups with this song.” “Oh, well you found me.” “Yeah… what now?” “Is that your hand?” a third voice, male, “Oh… sorry.” Jessica again, “Hey, let’s go this way.” “Ow! Shit!” “What?” “I hit my head on a desk.”
We finally found a corner to sit and talk. Mama-J never came back but no one dared to turn on the lights. At least one couple was going at something, but for the most part we all just tried to enjoy the peace and solitude that our school day usually didn’t provide. Having not been taught how to self-maintain once abandoned by our guiding instructors, all sorts of rowdy shenanigans replaced the task we’d begun. While this was not particularly unusual for my drama class, it was on this day that our teacher’s lesson actually began to resonate.
We’re all lost in the dark. It’s like someone turned out the lights and said, “Everyone! Yell as loud as you can so that somebody might hear you!” The sad part is that no matter how loud we hum our song, we still have no idea where we are or where we’re going. No one wants to admit this anarchy, at least not at school. Rather we’re all placed on a scale of 1 through 7 to determine just how well we can conform to an arbitrary system of mental ejaculation. We’re given a list of songs to sing while crawling through the dark. These are the songs that the educational elite will listen to.
American education continues to foster these failed ideals on knowledge. The institutions meant to propel us beyond these obviously broken systems are so caught up in money that they refuse to denounce the paperwork and statistics of the high school oxymoron. When are we going to wake up? The students who don’t fit the broken mold are some of the most independent idealists themselves. All my life I’ve been taught that to break the mold is the most important step to human individuality, or was this just a lie they tell us in school? Our society can’t self-proclaim a strong embrace of the arts while disqualifying the argument on the art of “how-to-learn.” It’s not rocket science. In fact it’s rational thinking, a term hijacked by the educational elite in their writings and studies. The rational mind is the new aristocracy as we enter a generation in desperate need of leadership and direction. We need yet another person to tell us what to do.
Well I’m not enlisting in the alphabet army, no matter how homoerotic my uniformed fantasies may be. This is war, folks. Those with the money are herding us like cattle, weeding us out of the dark and into their pockets in exchange for the “American Dream.”
So what happened to our schools? Is it the tradition itself of sitting in uncomfortable chairs within the awful color choice of muted green meets musky orange that we are so desperate to preserve? What values are we trying to achieve by herding our children through benchmarks and GPA’s? The lady on the corner of 56th and Lex makes a convincing argument, “They stop teaching prayer in school and now we’ve got autism.”
So many of my educators loved to rail on about the system. “They have us in a death grip,” my English teacher told me. “We have criteria that must be met, and the schools have a fixation on standardized tests.” Really? No shit! You don’t say so!?! Who’da’thunk that somebody somewhere was pushing benchmarks to guide our uninspired educators? Generations of sellouts have passed this deficit of integrity on to the youth of America so that idiots teach idiots and nobody learns a thing! I don’t think I’ve ever heard of a teacher getting fired for expanding on required projects. No teacher I know of has ever been dismissed for engaging and inspiring students through creative means (despite my better judgment, sexual means are not creative). Never has the temporary replacement of structure with freeform art been a mortal sin. We had two weeks to make party masks when reading Romeo & Juliet - graded of course - but no time to throw out these ever-looming deadlines.
Only sixty-nine percent of high school students manage to graduate. In the thirty-five largest U.S. cities, less than fifty percent of students starting their freshman year will see a high school diploma. How much longer can we blame students for the failures of those meant to guide us? It’s all about the degree. Those who pushed through while filling in dots with their number two pencil, content for whatever reason, suddenly have a world of opportunity before them (or so we are meant to believe). But what is the purpose of this world? Is it to make money? That’s the big winner?
What the fuck am I supposed to do with money? I guess spend it seems like the rational answer to that question. Give it to charity the more noble. But who am I in all this mess? I’m merely the man who takes a pile of nothing and hands it out across the world until it turns into something; a product so far beyond my own human capacities that I somehow think myself the messiah. The God. Whether this great pile of money represents selfishness or benevolence, it’s still the selfish result of a culture sold on selling out.
In the end, the great ideal is to be something because right now you’re absolutely nothing. An ad on the uptown D train says it all:
- “My train! Ahh, Phew. Made it. Can’t believe how crowded it is. Look at her… What a power suit… she must be on her way to a big meeting or an interview or something… I wish I had a reason to wear my power suit…” Adelphi University can take you there! -
I don’t think I remember “power suit” from sixth grade career day, but I guess it’s now an accredited degree. I bet that power suit is on her way to Adelphi University to beat off with her tenure and make a buck or two. Or maybe, grammatical errors included, the power suit is just a metaphor for the biggest problem of all. It’s something you buy. Your degree actually is your power suit! There’s an idea. How many years until it’s printed on Louis Vuitton paper?
What happened to dreams, man? Life may be about pushing yourself to the top, but shouldn’t that plateau be something personal? It should be something that makes your heart flutter whenever you think of it. It should take you to every place you every wanted to go, however few or many. These destinations should be filled with honest satisfaction, not material or accredited benchmarks. Life doesn’t sit and wait and say, “Here boy! This way… over here!”
To be honest, life is a cunt and she doesn’t give a shit if you got a perfect score on your SAT’s. She may choose to just fuck you over the very next day. So where are you left? Were you happy all those days you spent in your SAT prep class? Your PSAT prep class? How about your AP or IB exams? Have you proven yourself? What’s your grade? Your number? Feel enlightened yet?
Not a bit and I’m pissed. They always promised it would lead to bigger, greater things. They preached that when you finally turned the corner on high school that life would be in plain sight. What a sick misconception! I hope that youth today are dropping out not because they don’t want to learn but because they’re just not learning at all. They’re missing out on life and struggle in exchange for material bullshit. The room is still pitch-black, baby. Nobody’s ever going to turn the light on. So I say sing something good (preferably not the stars and bars) and hope that somebody somewhere is listening. And don’t shave your pillow, please… it’s sensitive down there.
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